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New Nintendo 3DS Hardware Info (Conference At 10 PST/1 EST Today)

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I

ILikeFeet

Banned
Drkirby said:
I wonder if Nintendo will allow companies at a later date turn up the CPU clock speeds.

Also, its possible these numbers are not set in stone and are still just development kits, though the only thing I see that I would think could change is more internal storage.
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did they ever do this with the DS?
 
D

Drkirby

Corporate Apologist
Instro said:
I imagine the first redesign will come with 128MB RAM to run a nice in game OS.
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If the 3DS doesn't have a game OS, the 3DS Revesion 4 in 2016 will not ether, IMO.
 
I

Instro

Member
Drkirby said:
If the 3DS doesn't have a game OS, the 3DS Revesion 4 in 2016 will not ether, IMO.
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More RAM is possible though since they did it with the DSi, and at 128MB they would certainly have enough to pull off such a feature no? It would be a pretty good selling point for a redesign with nicer cameras as well or something.
 
T

TestOfTide

Banned
nincompoop said:
WTF are you talking about? The Xbox had more than enough polygon-crunching power to create games with large, complex enviornments. (In fact its GPU can handle almost twice as many raw polygons as the PS2's.) I'm not debating which graphical approach is better, I'm just skeptical about whether the 3DS will even be capable of running games such as the Jak or PS2 Ratchet games or Transformers Armada or Far Cry Instincts or Oddworld Stranger's Wrath.

Maybe the PS2 doesn't have the shader architecture to reproduce the effects used in Revelations exactly, but it can still use its own effects to come up with something which looks equally impressive. But if the 3DS' GPU is as polygon-deficient as reported, then it won't have any games which even remotely resemble the ones I listed above.
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this. Which is even worse because you would expect a console focused on showing 3D to be able to show lots of polygons in 3D instead of less polygons with effects made to make them look flat and effects which we still aren't sure will look as convincing in 3D as they do in 2D.

the good news about this is that the engine looks to be amazing for things that are more closed spaced or fixed area like street fighter, splinter cell, resident evil, etcetera. There is also the benefit that for fixed camera angled, pre-rendered backgrounds, you can make said pre-rendered backgrounds look like 3D backgrounds simply by taking advantage of the 3D effect.

But I was hoping that the thing would at least be able to make games that have huge scale and lots of polygons. The kind of scale we saw in Halo 1 would not be possible on the 3DS it seems. From the looks of mario kart 3DS, we can't even get polys comparable the mario kart games on the wii and gamecube. Instead of aiming to try and make a 3D starfox assault we get starfox 64 with updated textures.

Perhaps the only silver lining to all this is that they could make some amazing looking scale in games if they decided to make the 3D screen blank and display the gameplay in the bottom, 2D screen. But only homebrew makers are going to try and do something as unsellable as that.
 
Chaplain

Chaplain

Member
TestOfTide said:
But I was hoping that the thing would at least be able to make games that have huge scale and lots of polygons. The kind of scale we saw in Halo 1 would not be possible on the 3DS it seems.
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Who said that the 3DS was not capable of matching the scale of Halo 1? That sounds really odd considering the 3DS uses a GPU much newer than the GPU in the Xbox.
 
R

redbarchetta

Banned
KAL2006 said:
another thing that pisses me off is the low quality cameras on the 3DS. The cameras should at least match the resolution of the 3DS screen.
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They do. The top-screen is effectively running at 400×240 for each eye in order for the 3D effect to work. The camera runs at 640×480, which as I'm sure you can tell, is a larger number.
 
G

Gospel

Parmesan et Romano
If Kojima put MGS3 on this system, it must be capable of something.

and if Saints Row: Drive By is third person and open world, open environments shouldn't be a problem.
 
E

Ezduo

Banned
nincompoop said:
WTF are you talking about? The Xbox had more than enough polygon-crunching power to create games with large, complex enviornments. (In fact its GPU can handle almost twice as many raw polygons as the PS2's.) I'm not debating which graphical approach is better, I'm just skeptical about whether the 3DS will even be capable of running games such as the Jak or PS2 Ratchet games or Transformers Armada or Far Cry Instincts or Oddworld Stranger's Wrath.
Click to expand...
Can't the PSP already run GTA games? Why wouldn't the 3DS be able to do similar?
 
Eteric Rice

Eteric Rice

Member
nincompoop said:
WTF are you talking about? The Xbox had more than enough polygon-crunching power to create games with large, complex enviornments. (In fact its GPU can handle almost twice as many raw polygons as the PS2's.) I'm not debating which graphical approach is better, I'm just skeptical about whether the 3DS will even be capable of running games such as the Jak or PS2 Ratchet games or Transformers Armada or Far Cry Instincts or Oddworld Stranger's Wrath.

Maybe the PS2 doesn't have the shader architecture to reproduce the effects used in Revelations exactly, but it can still use its own effects to come up with something which looks equally impressive. But if the 3DS' GPU is as polygon-deficient as reported, then it won't have any games which even remotely resemble the ones I listed above.
Click to expand...

Wasn't it confirmed that the gif you just posted was from the PC version of SH? :|
 
L

lostinblue

Banned
nincompoop said:
The Xbox had more than enough polygon-crunching power to create games with large, complex enviornments. (In fact its GPU can handle almost twice as many raw polygons as the PS2's.)
Click to expand...
Actually, it's all a bunch of bull really. PS2's max textured polygon throughput was 10 million poligons per second in a few select games, and Xbox max throughput was 15 million at 30 frames per second in rallisport challenge 2. PS2's maximum 75 million and Xbox 125 million meant nothing.

Halo 1 was coined at the time as a 10 million polygon game, Halo 2 though, had less polygons than the first. And it actually looks better with better draw distances (and the sacrifice was done so they could have more on-screen/better textures/bump maps everywhere)

And who had the biggest polygon throughputs of that generation? the gamecube, who had the worse "theoretical RAW polygon throughput" of the three. why? Because it was a texturing beast.

And trust me, you'll want a texturing beast over a polygon-pushing one.
nincompoop said:
I'm just skeptical about whether the 3DS will even be capable of running games such as the Jak or PS2 Ratchet games or Transformers Armada or Far Cry Instincts or Oddworld Stranger's Wrath.
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I don't see why it wouldn't, although a lower polygon budget on a portable system certainly wouldn't be ultrageous; truth is most games can be scaled back quite a bit to run on inferior hardware. Look at RE4 GC and how much it was scaled down to run on the PS2 (and there's a mobile phone version for it too) and those games were taking advantage of the systems strenghts. 3DS strenghts might be different, but I don't see why it couldn't run those games and make them better looking in the process. Running them "as is" though is a whole different question.

MGS3 for it already looks way better than it's PS2 counterpart when it comes to actual detail/geometry. It doesn't seem starved.
nincompoop said:
Maybe the PS2 doesn't have the shader architecture to reproduce the effects used in Revelations exactly, but it can still use its own effects to come up with something which looks equally impressive.
Click to expand...
sure, wasting all your polygon budget on a high poly character model skinned with low color depth textures knowing the maximum throughput of "that" that the machine can take is two of those characters on-screen at once?

That's artistry, not a means to reproduce it as is/do the same thing make no mistake.
nincompoop said:
But if the 3DS' GPU is as polygon-deficient as reported, then it won't have any games which even remotely resemble the ones I listed above.
Click to expand...
How much is polygon-deficient?
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
Serenade said:
If Kojima put MGS3 on this system, it must be capable of something.

and if Saints Row: Drive By is third person and open world, open environments shouldn't be a problem.
Click to expand...
He's talking about huge environments which uses complex geometry. The GPU might not excel at this yet there's probably a way for the dev to succesfully overcome this issue.
 
L

Lonely1

Unconfirmed Member
lostinblue said:
That's artistry, not a means to reproduce it as is/do the same thing make no mistake.How much is polygon-deficient?
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For some reason he sustains that 3DS has 1/3 of PSP polycount...
 
M

Man God

Non-Canon Member
ILikeFeet said:
did they ever do this with the DS?
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No. Sony did however underclock the PSP 1000 a few months before launch after realizing that peolpe really wouldn't put up with sub hour play time. :lol

Newer games can usually run at full speed if the game was designed for it.
 
D

DataBot

Member
Boney said:
6 days...
Click to expand...
2qkt2xd.gif
 
L

lostinblue

Banned
Lonely1 said:
For some reason he sustains that 3DS has 1/3 of PSP polycount...
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I see. Well, PSP is quite a bit polygon starved... everything 3DS we've seen suggests it's way, way better than that.

Not a third, not worse, not the same. Several times better.
 
V

Vic

Please help me with my bad english
The only instances where the 3DS seems to be quite poly starved is with the HD downports like the Capcom games.
 
A

antonz

Member
Eteric Rice said:
They seem to be pretty dissapointed on Beyond3D. :|

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?p=1474935#post1474935
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They are just a tech focused site so they miss the fact battery life matters in a handheld game device. Can you imagine the backlash from gamers if the 3DS had like a 5 hour battery life on lowest brightness settings.

I tend to believe as others have mentioned Nintendo much like Apple is guilty of delibertly underclocked hardware to meet specific goals. Even with my $2100 macbook pro Apple underclocked components all so they could meet their precious PR goals.

If anything it could allow nintendo to bring new life to the system in a few years performance wise if they let the chips full potential be unlocked with the caveat that battery life will be impacted
 
M

Mr. Wonderful

Member
A correction to the article in the OP that others have alluded to, but not directly stated: The iPhone used an ARM11 processor until the 3GS, which switched to an ARM Cortex A8. The iPhone 4 and the iPad then came out with the custom Apple-designed Cortex A8, the A4.

So CPU-wise, the 3DS is most comparable to the processor used in the original iPhone and iPhone 3G.
 
A

antonz

Member
jamesinclair said:
1.5GB sounds like 2GB - space the customer cannot use.
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That seems to be the case. The dev kit from filings shows a 2GB chip on the motherboard. With half a gig reserved for the OS etc I imagine Nintendo does have some surprises planned
 
R

Rich!

Member
jamesinclair said:
1.5GB sounds like 2GB - space the customer cannot use.
Click to expand...

Yep. And 1.5gb will be more than enough to start with IMO. Beats the 512mb on the Wii, doesn't it? :lol

Can't believe I'll finally be putting a preorder deposit down on this thing next week once the release dates and pricing are announced. Once I do that, the waiting game is on.
 
I

ILikeFeet

Banned
antonz said:
That seems to be the case. The dev kit from filings shows a 2GB chip on the motherboard. With half a gig reserved for the OS etc I imagine Nintendo does have some surprises planned
Click to expand...

what can you even use with half a gig?
 
R

Rich!

Member
ILikeFeet said:
what can you even use with half a gig?
Click to expand...

Plenty. An entire OS (I seriously doubt the 3DS OS will take up much room) and space for extra patches and updates, for example.
 
T

TestOfTide

Banned
lostinblue said:
I see. Well, PSP is quite a bit polygon starved... everything 3DS we've seen suggests it's way, way better than that.

Not a third, not worse, not the same. Several times better.
Click to expand...

Show me which game we have seen has proved the 3DS is capable of a decent polygon count.
 
K

Koren

Member
richisawesome said:
Yep. And 1.5gb will be more than enough to start with IMO. Beats the 512mb on the Wii, doesn't it? :lol
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Especially with SD support out of the box. The main problem with the Wii is not the memory, it's the time they needed to enable SD support.
 
R

Rich!

Member
swerve said:
When was the last time tech sites weren't disappointed with Nintendo hardware specs? I've (embarrassingly) read threads/magazine articles like this since the N64 days. But I've enjoyed literally hundreds of brilliant games on each of those systems, so...
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Yeah. I couldn't care less about comparisons to the iPhone. What I've seen so far is awesome, and the specs seem appropriate for a gaming centric handheld.

And it has Ocarina of Time on it. Updated. In 3D. That's all I need to know in order to buy it without a second thought.
 
A

antonz

Member
ILikeFeet said:
what can you even use with half a gig?
Click to expand...

Well DSI has a decent enough OS and channel based system using far less space than whats available. We know the 3DS has some sort of movie playback as they have deals with studios etc. I imagine they will have their Music playback still etc.

Nintendo isnt forced to make a super intensive OS so they can do alot with half a gig and have plenty of room left over for firmware updates etc
 
C

Celine

Member
MrBelmontvedere said:
well those specs are pretty much what I expected. in other words nintendo cheaped out!

yes it is more powerful than PSP, but you have to consider that PSP is 5 years old. it's nothing extraordinary to say nintendos *NEW* portable is more powerful than a 5 year old portable.

but I'm not really disappointed because this is in line with my expectations (always expect nintendo to be excruciatingly cheap). the autostereoscopic screen is by itself probably the most expensive component, and at least that made it out from nintendos Scrooge McDuck money bin intact.
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We can state if it is extraordinary or not only when Nintendo will reveal battery life and price.
 
L

lostinblue

Banned
TestOfTide said:
Show me which game we have seen has proved the 3DS is capable of a decent polygon count.
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I'll go with Metal Gear Solid 3 seeing the polygon models are quite a bit more detailed than it's PS2 counterparts (detailed ears instead of simply being textured) as well as the peace walker PSP models, and the scenarios don't seem to be starved as well.

One could go over RE: Revelations, SSF4 or DoA just fine as well, unless you consider they're showcasing bad graphics. Also decent/good polycount for a portable is different than saying unlimited.
 
M

MrBelmontvedere

Member
antonz said:
If anything it could allow nintendo to bring new life to the system in a few years performance wise if they let the chips full potential be unlocked with the caveat that battery life will be impacted
Click to expand...

just liike they did with the original DS?
 
K

Koren

Member
ILikeFeet said:
what can you even use with half a gig?
Click to expand...
I'm assuming you're joking, but it's really big. I've a complete Linux distribution with many many applications on an old 256MB USB key...

Damn Small Linux even packs :
SSH server/client
FTP server/client
HTTP server
XMMS
Dillo, Netrik and Firefox
Sylpheed
Spreadsheet, Ted
Beamer, Vim, Nano
Xpaint, Xzgv
XPDF
EmelFM
Naim
VNCviwer
and many other apps, tools, monitoring, printing, WiFi, PCMCIA, etc.

... in 1/10h of this size...
 
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