Support NeoGAF

[mrklaw]

Clearly PSP is currently king of handheld tech, but there is a lot of activity in this area, so how do the competition stack up?

You have ARM and the embedded PVR core; imageon and goforce from ATI and Nvidia, and maybe others.

NVidia and ATI escpecially seem to be quoting features like pixel shaders etc in their chips, so can they outperform PSP?

In theory, how difficult would it be for Nintendo or Microsoft for example to build an off the shelf solution that beats PSP? Ignore battery and cost for now - lets assume these 'mobile' solutions do what they say and deliver low cost, low battery usage (they are designed for mobile phones/pdas etc)

 

[Deg]

I'd say wait. Its obvious even PSP will need the revisions. Handheld tech is moving really fast nowadays.

Nintendo will likely get a customized graphics solution from ATI. Would be easy to top PSP in tech. Of course cost is an issue but prices are falling fast and tech is advancing very fast at the same time. So you can get more bang for buck and its improving. Not saying GBA prices yet however.

 

[Chittagong]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch. In fact, I expect that the PSP supporters change camps then to "graphics aren't important in portables". That said, the screen and casing of PSP are simply amazing, they are the best part of the package and hard to be topped anytime soon.

 

[Brofist]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch.

Do you mean in handheld gaming devices, or just all handheld devices? I imagine if you mean all before PSP even sees a release there will be much faster chipsets in handheld devices...but not in a dedicated gaming portable for a little while at least.

In fact, I expect that the PSP supporters change camps then to "graphics aren't important in portables". That said, the screen and casing of PSP are simply amazing, they are the best part of the package and hard to be topped anytime soon.

I feel bad for the person who's that fickle. :lol

 

[cybamerc]

Of course something better will come out eventually. That doesn't change the fact that PSP is very impressive hardware and that there's nothing else out there that compares right now.

 

[McFly]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch.

Then how would you describe the chips in the DS and the amount it will get kicked?

Fredi

 

[Chittagong]

Then how would you describe the chips in the DS and the amount it will get kicked?

Fredi

Enormous. It isn't too future proof techwise, but that's Nintendo's style on handhelds. At least this time they have some genuinely new functions to compensate the cheap ass tech. I'm getting both devices nevertheless.

 

[Doom_Bringer]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch.

:lol the same could be said about ANY console hardware

PC will kick XBOX2's ass in a year

 

[Deg]

:lol the same could be said about ANY console hardware

PC will kick XBOX2's ass in a year

I'll bet on no

 

[Project Midway]

I think we will see technology in other consumer products (PDAs/cell phones) thats more powerfull than PSP during 2006.

 

[Doom_Bringer]

They might have the tech but will they have the games, or the big lcd screen, be smaller in size?

probably not


only GBA and PSP will own the handheld market

 

[Lord Error]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny

If by upcoming tech you mean nVidia 4500, or PVR MBX or ATI's mobile 3D chip (chips basically available today, but not implememnted in any viable PDA device yet), then hell no. 4500 is a weaksauce compared to PSP, and MBX is somewhat comparable but not at all better. I expect newer, better chips to appear in 1-1.5 years time and those I'd expect to be in some ways better than PSP. Handheld 3D tech does not progress all that fast, actually.

 

[Doom_Bringer]

If by upcoming tech you mean nVidia 4500, or PVR MBX or ATI's mobile 3D chip (chips basically available today, but not implememnted in any viable PDA device), then hell no. 4500 is a weaksauce compared to PSP, and MBX is somewhat comparable but not at all better. I expect newer, better chips to appear in 1-1.5 years time and those I'd expect to be in some ways better than PSP. Handheld 3D tech does not progress all that fast, actually.

Hes a xbox fanboy didn't you see his Sega handheld post thread

http://www.ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=21848&highlight=sega

 

[garrickk]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch. In fact, I expect that the PSP supporters change camps then to "graphics aren't important in portables". That said, the screen and casing of PSP are simply amazing, they are the best part of the package and hard to be topped anytime soon.

I feel the opposite.

I think the PSP's screen is going to get its ass kicked in 2-3 years. 480x272 is not enough. No way. It's resolution is too low and a lot of LCD fabrication plants are beginning to produce displays with MUCH smaller pixels now to fit more resolution in the same space. Have you seen small PDA's out now with 640x480 screens? That's 2.35 TIMES MORE PIXELS - 2.35 times more detail possible - and they are out now.

I'm still excited about the PSP. However, the screen will be owned in a few years.

EDIT: I should say that I don't think that 480x272 is enough to keep the PSP as the most robust handheld game system for too long. I still think it will be a kick-ass game system for 4+ years at least - especially once they have OLED displays and the semiconductors manufactured at smaller processes so the battery life ballons. In three years some PDA company like Tapwave (?) will come out with a device the same size as the PSP that has a 853x480 screen, 1GHz Intel ARM processor, and a nice, embedded, dedicated 3D Processor. However, the optical disks of the PSP will be able to provide a lot of content cheaply, and they won't sell enough units of a consistant platform to draw a lot of game development.

 

[Lord Error]

480x272 is not enough. No way. It's resolution is too low and a lot of LCD fabrication plants are beginning to produce displays with MUCH smaller pixels now to fit more resolution in the same space. Have you seen small PDA's out now with 640x480 screens? That's 2.35 TIMES MORE PIXELS - 2.35 times more detail possible - and they are out now.

And you yould need graphics chips with 2.35x faster fillrate to make some use of those extra pixels. What good are the small pixels on future, say, 800x600 LCD screens, when the graphics chips can't render on them fast enough? PSP resolution is about perfect for the power of it's 3D chip, and it's LCD manufacturing technology is ahead of pretty much anything else right now, giving it great brightness/contrast. Those are things, that are IMO much more important than the resolution, especially on a gaming device. Seeing how on PDAs, screens have changed so little in that regard in the past two years, I doubt PSP screen will be topped anythime soon. PDA makers will stick to 640x480 for a long time to come. Also, OLED screens, at least those avaialble today, are still not as good in brightness/contrast as the screen used on PSP.

*edit* In three years time, no doubt, something more powerful will come out, but that's three years, think about it. Also, think of how much software support some tapwave-like device will have compared to PSP...

 

[Project Midway]

*edit* In three years time, no doubt, something more powerful will come out, but that's three years, think about it. Also, think of how much software support some tapwave-like device will have compared to PSP...

No. In two years time.

Software support is a completely different topic...

 

[NohWun]

PSP is aiming for a target that it can't really reach, actually. But then again, so are most all chips designed for handhelds.

Power (volts, amps, watts) really is the biggest limitation for handhelds. If a chip claims high performance figures, then that directly implies that battery life will be short if those features are constantly used.

You can bet that the PSPs capabilities will not be used to the fullest, since that would mean only having 1 hour of gameplay.

Future tech for handhelds will have to solve the power problem before you see any additional meaningful performance. This won't stop manufacturers from giving you their "peak, never to be exceeded" performance figures, which won't even be reached by a longshot.

 

[xexex]

PSP kicks the crap out of all handheld graphics solutions right now. and probabl will through out 2005. by 2006 we will see solutions if not actual products that compete with and perhaps surpass PSP.

by 2007 PSP will look old and weak. but PSP will be more impressive in 2004-2005 than GameBoy was in 1989 and GamBoy Color was in 1998.

 

[Fafalada]

The chip in PSP is in my opinion the least impressive part of the system, and will get its ass kicked by upcoming mobile chips so bad it isn't even funny, and this will happen in about a year from PSP US launch.

I disagree - as far as handheld solutions go, it's got pretty much the ideal ratio between power&programmability. I don't like the fact that it has a clearly overengineered feature-set, but aside for that, they made mostly the right choices.
And the VFPU (which isn't part of the GPU, but it IS part of the same chip ), is just plain great.
Anyway, I am a big fan of programmability, so I would have liked more of that for the GPU, but fact is it takes more money and time for software to use that - and handheld development is more about getting results fast then anything else.

In fact, I expect that the PSP supporters change camps then to "graphics aren't important in portables".

I doubt that is gonna happen for another two years though, perhaps more. Heck, there's already pretty spiffy 3d PPCs just around the corner (I think you can't buy them just yet?) and it'll be another 6 months before they have software that can compete even with DS properly...
Now if only their battery life wasn't already worse then PSPs is

 

[Lazy8s]

The technology leader appears to be system-on-chips from Renesas, a Hitachi and Mitsubishi joint spin-off wielding a PowerVR MBX license. Their designs are consistently smaller, less expensive, cooler running, and more battery efficient than the rest of the industry and boast feature sets that make even the consoles envious: full 32-bit precision for depth (Z) and color calculations, support for resolutions of 640x480 and higher, FSAA at no penalty, curved surface acceleration with fractional tesselation and no seams between patch edges, VS 1.1-level support for skeletal animation, and dot product per-pixel blends like DOT3. They've already put out the SH7770 chip earlier this year, targeted at embedded markets like car navigation/infotainment which are sensitive to space/cost/heat/power, delivering 2.8 GLOPS and 720 MIPS from its SH-4A core (essentially an optimized Dreamcast CPU clocked at twice the rate). Another of their SuperH+MBX SoCs, the SH3707 launching in a few months, has been tailored to 2.1 GFLOPS and 540 MIPS for power saving trade-offs -- apparently for upcoming mobile gaming devices (Sega Sammy?) -- and performs in-game sustained rates of about four million polygons and 750 MPixels per second presumably.

The battery life is quite good with MBX. One of the mobile products it's implemented in (in MBX-Lite form) is the recently launched Dell Axim x50v PDA that saddles it with a power-hungry 624 MHz Intel XScale CPU and 640x480 screen, and it still tested at over five hours playtime under full stress -- running a movie file with the screen and volume at maximum.

Another promising mobile solution now available for licensing comes from BitBoys. Their new line is already offering programmable vertex and pixel processors at the high end. Some demos, which were emulating the chip on a laptop, can be seen here:
http://www.students.tut.fi/~hkultala/bb_kuvat/CIMG1646.AVI
http://www.students.tut.fi/~hkultala/bb_kuvat/CIMG1649.AVI
http://www.students.tut.fi/~hkultala/bb_kuvat/CIMG1650.AVI

 

[mrklaw]

targeted at embedded markets like car navigation/infotainment

Yeah, those japanese need their car navigation systems with maps that look like GTA...those things are insane. I'm happy with having 3D flat road maps for the first time, and those guys have actual 3D buildings mapped along the route.

 

[Lazy8s]

True, there's a crossover market there where a developer could model city streets down to exacting detail and use it for both car navigation and racing game software. The SH7770 and SH3707 actually allow small, embedded devices to run the same level of software as consoles, enabling content and assets to be interchanged directly for savings on development resources.