Nintendo 3DS - Page 2

PSP launched at $250, not $200, and it too was estimated to launch higher than that by "major market analyists" (and even at $250 was said at the time to be outside the confort zone for a handheld gaming device). they always overestimate the price. the real thing tho is the last several years in the mobile market has pushed mobile CPUs and graphics hardware capabilities to the extreme, and Nintendo's going to be using already existing tech in this thing from the mobile market instead of new tech (Tegra as originally stated, and maybe still a Tegra variant). so its not going to be like a phone (which, at full price instead of contract price, is going to be expensive because not only do they have to recoup R&D costs, but will only be viable on market for maybe 6 months before people are going to want the newer and better). a HUGE commitment to the manufacturer over a very LONG product run (which is guaraunteed to be extremely successful since its a Nintendo handheld) would allow them to buy the hardware at rock bottom prices.

in the end we'll just have to wait and see for an official price, but I really don't expect it to be that much.

looks like the GPU manufacturer's just outed themselves. using a SoC called Pica200, an OpenGL ES 1.1 compatible GPU with their own added extensions

http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=32326 <-- thats a report from when the Pica200 was first introduced in 2006. no word on whether its that same first-gen Pica200, or an updated version

EDIT: futuremark did a video demonstrating its capabilities sometime back

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A-xxUyJvQQ

yah designed for cell phones, consoles, and other embedded devices. things got an interesting set of features, looking over all the materials. I cant find any references to devices using it in particular, but theres probably some phones and stuff using it in Japan.

its an OpenGL ES 1.1-compatible GPU with some extensions (and some interesting ones too, like the hardware tesselation feature thats part of the DX11 spec), cant find details on the shader models it supports. moves 15.3M polys/s and 800M px/s at the clock speed the 3DS will be using, which isnt much compared to a desktop GPU but considering its working only with a 800x320 resolution (or half that when 3D is turned off entirely) it doesn't need that much.

for reference, rates for 360 and PS3 are 500M polys/s for the 360 and 250 polys/ s for the PS3. PS3 uses a custom blend of OpenGL 1.0 ES + some extensions + nVidia Cg shader language for its API, and the 360 uses DX9 with Shader Model 3 + special extensions. the DS has a hard limit of 2048 triangles per frame ( roughly 122K polys/s) and no vertex or pixel shader support. Gamecube GPU is max 12M polys/sec and 650M pixels/sec (Wii's would be somewhere a little higher than that, since it uses pretty much the same GPU but with higher clock speeds)

rumor now that the CPU for the 3DS is the multi-core Marvell Armada ARM, based on a statement in an earnings report from Marvell

http://www.engadget.com/2010/08/24/m...game-platform/

okay, I lose then, launch price is officially $250