Nintendo 3DS technical discuss thread: lets talk about this here
- Thread starter BDGAME
- Start date
Very happy to with my decision to wait until next year on the 3DS. I don't believe in buying multiple revisions of systems, and as an owner of an original DS and original PSP there was no way I was gonna get stuck with bulky hardware again. Definitely looking forward to getting one though. By the end of this year there will be no reason to complain about a lack of games, and I'm now banking on them adding a second stick to the revision. Thats when I'll be jumping in.
Hugh Buelow
Member
The iphone is most probably sold with a generous profit margin. For the Vita, I'm not so sure. But my point is, for that price, you can put more powerful hardware, while still making profits on it.dark10x said:
But it's not really free. You are paying for it. A lot. For it to be free, I'm expecting a 3 years contract...StuBurns said:
Rodney McKay
Member
So 3DS games will never look better than they do right now?PdotMichael said:
As if that even matters. Do you think Infinity Blade is voodoo? The machine is capable of outclassing the 3DS, and it has.firelink said:
Also, Rage looks better than any 3DS games too. However as someone who doesn't really care about iOS gaming, I'm hardly the person to educate you.
Two years actually, but that's hardly the point. The iPod Touch is equally powerful, and until just recently was cheaper than the 3DS.Hugh Buelow said:
It's irrelevant how much it costs though, it could be ten grand and it wouldn't have stopped it adjusting my appreciation of the technical performance of the 3DS. I can't control what impresses me, the 3DS does not. I'm not saying the PSV will before firelink makes another out of the blue mindless comment about my posts.
PdotMichael
Banned
Rodney McKay said:
not ps2 like, yeah of course
Oh? Find me a 3DS title with visuals on par with Ridge Racer V.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US2-Hvjr6Ls
That intro was really impressive back in 2000. 100% realtime at 60 fps. Ridge Racer 3D doesn't feature nearly as much detail in its visuals and runs at half the framerate. It was jaggy, a common problem with early PS2 titles, but the resolution was still higher than what you see on 3DS.
Also, developers weren't familiar with the visual techniques necessary to produce high quality PS2 games at the time. The 3DS in 2011 is old technology and should be much easier to exploit.
Of course they will, but I doubt any leap will be as significant as what we saw with PS2.
StuBurns said:
I specifically said it had better hardware. Come on man, I don't want issues here. I know the iPhone 4 has higher end hardware.
But like you mentioned Carmack said, it might all come down to the API this time too. Infinitely Blade is IOS's flagship title in terms of performance and visuals. If the 3DS can produce something better than that in a couple of years, the hardware argument becomes pretty moot.
I disagree.
I believe we will be seeing some pretty impressive 3DS games coming in the future.
Bluemercury
Member
Durante said:
Not the iphone5 but android smartphones first
PdotMichael
Banned
lol
it sounds like a bad premonition
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
Strongly disagree about the bolded part. Content creation pipelines seldom expect the asset artists to go down to shader creation - these things normally originate elsewhere and are taken as 'pre-canned' in the assets creation pipeline.Durante said:
As long as 3ds' 'pre-canned' pixel shader effects overlap with what most current games out there use, assets will be reuse/downport-friendly.
This is true in terms of asset creation, I guess it really is a matter of how well the content creation tools offered map to the hardware. What we've seen so far in general doesn't inspire confidence though.blu said:
I still think the point about the "entirely separate software" holds though, the code path will have to be quite different with no programmable shaders.
Hugh Buelow
Member
StuBurns said:
The price one can sell a device is one factor that dictate the level of the tech inside it. Nintendo wouldn't be able to sell a console for 550$, yet, people here seem to expect them to ship a device just as powerful (if not more).
chickdigger802
Banned
Might just be me, but I'd rather have more sprite based games. Can't wait for some wayforward titles on 3ds.
Oh and another mario & luigi would be amazing.
Oh and another mario & luigi would be amazing.
Shadow of the BEAST
Banned
3ds looks closer to psp than it does xbox or even gamecube.
I never said I expect iPhone 4 quality visuals, I said I can't find myself all that impressed by a dedicated handheld that isn't as powerful as my phone, which is actually much smaller too.Hugh Buelow said:
However, PSV is the same price 3DS was, and it is looking to produce much better than iPhone 4 visuals, so any excuse concerning price I'm going to write off as untrue. Nintendo very easily could have made a PSV quality system. And the Wii could have been PS360 quality, and although I'd say it's too early to say, the WiiU is looking every bit as underpowered all their post-GC systems.
Minsc
Gold Member
Here is my biggest problem with the 3DS (I know it's the DS, but the resolution is similarly low, 400x240 vs 256x192 against 960x640):
Compared to say how it looks on an iPod Touch:
Clearly not a deal breaker, but my enjoyment of games is lowered a bit visually by the 3DS's resolution (unless the game is meant to be low-res). Still, I'd take a fun low-res 2D game over a crappy high-res one any day, it's just a shame the 3DS games aren't ~2x the resolution.
Compared to say how it looks on an iPod Touch:
Clearly not a deal breaker, but my enjoyment of games is lowered a bit visually by the 3DS's resolution (unless the game is meant to be low-res). Still, I'd take a fun low-res 2D game over a crappy high-res one any day, it's just a shame the 3DS games aren't ~2x the resolution.
Pachterballs
Banned
firelink said:
apple and oranges. IOS gaming = $0.99 on sale and that can't be beat. discount itunes cards makes these games $0.80. even better. There are plenty of amazing looking iOS games - not iOS polygonal of course the sprite based titles can look very nice.
plus on ipad = even better.
this.
Shadow of the BEAST
Banned
dark10x said:
that still looks good.
DeaconKnowledge
Member
God I love these "convince me what the hardware's capable of in the future using games from the present" arguments.
I'm not denying that fact.
However, the difference between launch PS2 games and some of the games released later in its life are SO significant that it may well have been a different platform all together. Take a look at something like Burnout 1 vs Burnout Revenge. The difference is ENORMOUS.
We went from a launch title like this...
to this...
You really think we're going to see leaps of that magnitude on 3DS?
Hugh Buelow
Member
Reallink said:
I was under the impression that the IPod Touch was less powerful than the iphone. Tech wise, they both seem very similar, so my point is invalid.
Sorry.
Not quite: the PS2 was incredibly hard to program for, all launch games were severely gimped.dark10x said:
But to say that the 3DS is maxed out based on fist and second gen games is unwise. Devs still need to learn how to do things efficiently with the GPU, speciallywhen it comes to reducing the cost of 3D (which by proxy improves the overall quality of the game).
Games with large scale environments could easily use impostors to render distant characters and objects only once per frame in 3D. Even scenery beyond a certain point could be rendered only once too, since after a certain distance depth differences aren't easily noticeable.
Also, the ARM11 is a member of the first family of ARM CPUs which has SIMD instructions and I seriously doubt any game currently on market is actually using them yet. It would allow devs to avoid using the vertex shaders for animating characters and thus reduce their cost in 3D.
And finally, there's the clock speed thing. I believe the 3DS GPU was downclocked a few months before release. I remember footage of the RE:Revelations demo in a 3DS event way before launch: it had more dynamic per-pixel lights than the Mercenaries demo and the flashlight cast shadows on everything (on the demo only monsters/characters cast shadows). And it was running on 3DS pre-release units on people's hands, with 3D on. If later games can use the original GPU clock (like later PSP games did) they could get a sizable complexity boost.
The iPod Touch has the same internal hardware, but a worse quality screen. The reason it is much cheaper than the iPhone is due to the way Apple handles production: the iTouchs are made after the iPhones they are based on have reached mass market production volume and approach the peak of their demand. So the hardware is both cheaper to produce and Apple has a surplus of production capacity due to the demand peaking, so they use it to produce iTouches.Hugh Buelow said:
AndyMoogle
Member
Let's not forget that there is a second screen on the 3DS. Sure, it's mostly used for low res 2D stuff, but a piece of the hardware goes to that.
Also, I'd like to give some credit to Nintendo for making an OS that runs smoothly. The multitasking while playing a game is pretty nice and quick. You can take notes and a picture of the paused screen in the game, browse on the web, and some other minor things while the game is still running.
I was actually pretty surprised that Nintendo could make an OS with multitasking that is much smoother than what we get on Xbox 360 for example. I definitely think that they should get some credit for that. It's not extremely impressive or complicated, but it works nicely and it's not sluggish.
Also, I'd like to give some credit to Nintendo for making an OS that runs smoothly. The multitasking while playing a game is pretty nice and quick. You can take notes and a picture of the paused screen in the game, browse on the web, and some other minor things while the game is still running.
I was actually pretty surprised that Nintendo could make an OS with multitasking that is much smoother than what we get on Xbox 360 for example. I definitely think that they should get some credit for that. It's not extremely impressive or complicated, but it works nicely and it's not sluggish.
DeaconKnowledge
Member
StuBurns said:
Oh man
"Resolution" means two different things. There's the absolute number of pixels displayed, and the pixel density. While the 3DS doesn't display a huge number of pixels, the density is fine. Or to put it simply: For a display this size, the resolution is perfectly acceptable. Pretty good even. One of the reasons games on the actual system look leaps and bounds better than screenshots and trailers on the internet.Kosma said:
That makes no sense. It would only need a higher resolution (more pixels) if the screens were bigger. Screenshots and trailers look like jaggy messes on a PC because the PC is typically the system with the "shit resolution" (pixel density). The physical resolution of the 3DS top screen actually exceeds that of the Vita as far as I remember (266PPI vs. 237PPI).StuBurns said:
PdotMichael
Banned
wsippel said:
the physical resolution is not important, you will see just 400 x 240
wsippel said:
3ds PPI = 133