[citation][nom]christopherknapp[/nom]I smell virtual boy.[/citation]
Naw, that'd be a very poor comparison. Sure, they were both made by Nintendo, and used a form of technology to give 3D display, to capitalize on contemporary 3D popularity. The similarities kinda end there.
The Virtual Boy was hampered by a clunky design, and underwhelming appearances. A trade-off for its 3D qualities was the fact that games were monochrome wireframe, hardly looking impressive at all; it easily out-weighed the advantages the 3D display brought. Similarly, the controller pre-dated the adoption of the analog stick, making it very hard to control with just a pair of D-pads. Lastly, what perhaps truly sunk it was the staggering lack of games; in the USA, third-party titles were all but nonexistent, with just 14 games released in total.
The 3DS fixes virtually all of this; the graphics technology is clearly potent enough, as it is clearly handling GameCube and PS2 games with ease, potentially even rivaling current-gen consoles, making graphics truly worth viewing in 3D. Similarly, control is better off; reports are that the analog nub is the best such input of any handheld yet, (besting the PSP's) as well as the touchscreen being easier to use. (reports are that the stylus is now VERY optional) Further, rather than equiping bulky goggles, the handheld form factor is virtually unchanged from a proven, 100+ million sellin winner; the "no glasses" thing can only help it in adoption.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, are the games; Nintendo has possibly the most staggering (and promising) third-party lineup ever seen for any console or handheld; aside from porting major first- and third-party titles, (
Metal Gear Solid 3 CANNOT be emphasized enough here) but we're seeing mainline, "serious" series all getting in the action, from
Saint's Row to
Ninja Gaiden to
Resident Evil. An added plus is that a lot of them rest heavily on the visual "wow" factor, and will definitely benefit from 3D here.
All told, I think Nintendo's just given themselves yet another license to print money.
[citation][nom]zaznet[/nom]I can't recall the last time Nintendo released something that was "high end" in relation to tech that was available. It would be unlike them to sell it at a loss so they have to make cuts (screen size) to keep it in the target price point.[/citation]
Technically, Nintendo did this with the Nintendo64; while hampered by a few design choices, (most notably, the reluctance to leave the super-expensive cartridge format, which made game development too expensive and risky for developers) was most certainly VASTLY more powerful than its other 5th-generation competitors like the PS1 and Saturn; bilinear filtering, alpha-blended multitexturing, full-scene anti-aliasing, hardware T&L, per-pixel lighting/shading effects, and real-time soft shadows were all features that put it leagues ahead of the other consoles, and even, for a while, desktop PCs. It remains, to this date, the only console to surpass gaming PCs at its release, or even come close to their level.
And yes, selling a console or handheld for a loss, in spite of much of the press surrounding Microsoft and Sony, is
in fact a rarity. As it happens, since the 3rd generation (commonly called the "8-bit era") out of the dozens of consoles and handhelds, a grand total of three launched to sell at a loss: the Microsoft Xbox, Xbox 360, and Sony PS3. So that idea is NOT long-standing, but rather, a very new idea, and certainly one that won't last. Microsoft sold the Xbox at a loss to try to take advantage of its vast stores of wealth to basically "buy" its way into the console market. The PS3 was sold at a loss because Sony's execs are retarded, and somehow thought that they'd magically have huge game sales instantly. (as it happens, the PS3 still has overall cost Sony money) The 360 lost money at launch, but not much, and not for long; in that case, Microsoft made a decently-calculated tradeoff, but still was basically "buying" their way more into the market.
So no, to think that Nintendo would design a handheld to sell it at a loss is just plain silly. As I'd said above, they're in the market to make money, not to fulfil fans' pipe dreams.
[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]The fact is, until we get official confirmation from either Nintendo, or someone disassembling a production unit, the PICA200 itself is mere speculation (I didn't read the original leak, so I don't know how this info surfaced).[/citation]
It's not speculative; this all surfaced when DMP, the designer of the PICA200,
made a press release announcing the use of their design in the 3DS. I actually thought you'd already seen it; my apologies for not posting it sooner.
[citation][nom]dragonsqrrl[/nom]And that additional info on the PSP CPU/GPU was great, I had no idea it's GPU couldn't perform transform and lighting. That would certainly limit the systems ability to hit its 33 million poly/sec maximum, whereas the 3DS should be much more capable of achieving its speculated 30.6 million poly/sec and 1.6 billion pixel/sec maximums.[/citation]
Yeah, after a lot of digging, I'd discovered that the GPU design in the PSP is little more than what they literally say; the "rendering engine" is a pretty standard raster pipeline (ROPs) while the "surface engine" very aptly describes run-of-the-mill texture-mapping units. (TMUs)
Though in the PSP's defense, I will note that it does have two CPUs available to it; the T&L is handled through the SIMD unit in the main CPU (which shares its package with the GPU) while there's also the co-CPU, the "Media Engine." I'm aware that it contains a single scalar FPU, as well as something they call the "Virtual Mobile Engine." I'm not entirely positive what it is, but it appears to be a watered-down SIMD unit designed expressly for video/signal processing. While I've not really had experience programming the PSP, I wouldn't be surprised if the co-CPU's main FPU could be used to handle some game tasks... But even in that case, it's hard to imagine a cse where the PSP would reliably hit close to its theoretical polygon level in a real-world application.
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