[citation][nom]captainm27[/nom]Sure, Nintendo will lose massive money in the initial year or two, but they will rake that up with all the millions that this is going to guarantee sell.[/citation]
Tell that to Sony, who tried that with their PS3. Or Microsoft, who did that with the original Xbox. While the Xbox 360 made a profit in spite of initially selling at a loss, it wasn't due to game sales, but rather the fact that the loss was small, and die shrinks and revisions quickly slashed into the cost of manufacture. On the other side, the Xbox 1 wound up being a huge, multi-hundred-million-dollar loss for Microsoft, and the PS3 likewise for Sony.
One must remember: these companies are in the business to make money, not to satisfy fans' dreams. And while some might argue for the "sell at a loss" gambit, a company as conservative and cautious as Nintendo is never going to take a risk like that, especially given the real-world results we've seen from this risk.
[citation][nom]descendency[/nom]The PSP kills the 3DS in terms of triangles computed per second. What does that mean? It means that more complicated geometry can be done on the PSP (or 'fewer jaggies').[/citation]
Actually, the on-paper specs don't mean so much there... Traingles-per-second really stopped mattering back after 2001 or so, when it was the main dick-waving contest between the PS2 and Xbox. Especially since this can't be done as a strict comparison: the PSP uses programmable resources for T&L, while the 3DS has a fixed-function T&L unit. What does this mean? It means that SURE, the PSP can jack up the number of polys, but it drains resources away that could be used for other effects, or the came core itself, while the 3DS may have a lower theoretical limit on polys, it can pretty much always run at that limit without strangling other parts of the system.
The texturing power, though, indeed blows the altnernatives away. Some rumors seem to be in line with the GPU actually clocking at MORE than the baseline 200 MHz, giving it fill-rates that could allow for detail levels that'd rival modern 7th-generation consoles. (once difference of resolution are accounted for) Indeed, some of the E3 demonstrations seem to bear this out; the GPU can apparently handle all the common shaders popular in Xbox 360 and PS3 games (normal-, specular-, and shadow-mapping among others) for essentially free, as they're handled through fixed-function units built into each texture unit, rather than relying on real-time computations done by programming the pixel shaders. The only commonly-seen thing it seems to lack is support for are bloom/HDR.
[citation][nom]descendency[/nom]More resolution = fewer jaggies. Rumors are floating about that this device isn't going to come cheap.[/citation]
I'm not 100% positive, but it does appear the 3DS has something arguing strongly in its favor for lower jaggies: the use of anti-aliasing. That alone can do far more than a resolution bump, so while the effective 400x240 of the 3DS may be technically lower than the 480x272 of the PSP, the images should appear vastly sharper and crisper.
No word on the price, though Nintendo isn't one for vastly high costs, nor do they sell their hardware at a loss. $200-250 is more liable to be the price range for this sort of thing, I'd guess. The latter seems a bit high, but mostly I don't know how Nintendo's going to have this play along with the $190 DSi XL; the latter *IS* much bigger, but they may opt to slash the price on it. I suppose it might be helpful to do some research on price history of previous handhelds, since Nintendo has invariably kept their old generation along as a "cheaper alternative" to their current one. (I.e, GBC when the GBA was out, GBA alongside the DS, DS Lite and DSi, etc.)
Facebook
Twitter