Shocking News: the Nintendo DS runs Windows 95 (mini Pana-review) ;)
- Thread starter Panajev2001a
- Start date
SFA3 looks gorgeous on the top screen.
Interesting note:
If you set the DS to auto boot, but have both a DS and GBA cart loaded in the media bays, it'll auto-boot the DS game. If you remove the DS game but keep the GBA game in, then it'll auto-boot the GBA game. Cool.
Interesting note:
If you set the DS to auto boot, but have both a DS and GBA cart loaded in the media bays, it'll auto-boot the DS game. If you remove the DS game but keep the GBA game in, then it'll auto-boot the GBA game. Cool.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
This could be a DS tech info thread if we can muster some more data.
I have found some new info at Beyond 3D
Ector:
I have found some new info at Beyond 3D
Ector:
It's interesting that there's a T&L engine in it. That explains fast framerates in games despite slow CPUs. I guess I'll have to see the unit in person to see if that shaky feel is really there. That's one thing that gives it's graphics a definite throwback to PSX times (at least in videos)
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
The screen hardware itself is interlaced. Since it's an LCD, it does not flicker like interlaced TV, but the lines update in the interlaced fashion.
The DS graphics are a mixed bag.
One the one hand, it seems to be pushing a lot of polygons, relative to Nintendo 64, anyway.
But the textures really do look absolutely HORRIBLE. I swear, they really are straight out of a PSX. It needs to be filtered to some degree.
Also, the polygons don't have the stability that ones on Nintendo 64 had. With or without being pixelized, the polygons show many more seams and don't seem "as one" as those on Nintendo 64 did. Nintendo 64 produced rock-solid polygons in comparison.
One the one hand, it seems to be pushing a lot of polygons, relative to Nintendo 64, anyway.
But the textures really do look absolutely HORRIBLE. I swear, they really are straight out of a PSX. It needs to be filtered to some degree.
Also, the polygons don't have the stability that ones on Nintendo 64 had. With or without being pixelized, the polygons show many more seams and don't seem "as one" as those on Nintendo 64 did. Nintendo 64 produced rock-solid polygons in comparison.
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
PS1 had more problems than what I'm describing, most annoying being texture warping due to lack of perspective correction. The possible problem I'm referring to is definitely more subtle than warping.
Yes, that is what I'm talking about.
N64 I think had floating point math functions.
Marconelly said:
Could you perhaps give me an example for reference?
I remember when I first plugged in Vagrant Story (about 2 years ago, late to the party, I know), I almost threw up during the opening cinematic. Every time the camera panned, it looked the background scenes fell apart and struggled to jumble themselves back together in a split second. And I'm not joking, I don't mean that I almost threw up because it was nasty, just because I found the entire experience disorientating and dizzying. I wound up getting used to it.
I understand that is NOT what you mean when talking about the NDS...
Lord Error
Insane For Sony
No, the effect you are describing is texture warping due to lack of perspective correction. Very few PS1 games were able to avoid that to a reasonable degree, but dynamically tesselating the geometry near the camera. That's one nasty 3D artifact, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's hard to really describe what I'm talking about and it might just be videos after all, but if Snapty is not just trolling, that would be better description of what I said.
*edit* can you direct me to a site that has the best video captures od DS games? I understand that IGN's video capturing is bad, despite it being some kind of direct feed device it obviously adds tons of garbage that I strongly believe can't be there on the real life picture. IGN's video grabs actually made me think that DS has an interlaced screens because it seems like their videos are (poorly) de-interlaced. Gamespot's videos are poststamp tiny, too small to judge.
*edit* can you direct me to a site that has the best video captures od DS games? I understand that IGN's video capturing is bad, despite it being some kind of direct feed device it obviously adds tons of garbage that I strongly believe can't be there on the real life picture. IGN's video grabs actually made me think that DS has an interlaced screens because it seems like their videos are (poorly) de-interlaced. Gamespot's videos are poststamp tiny, too small to judge.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Marconelly said:
Finally this hit the news... but there is more hidden
.Fixed-point math T&L unit is an interesting fact: who knows if they salvaged the RSP (it was not a bad Vector processor, really) or if they went with a newer design...
The important thing is that at least they have perspective corrected texturing and the performance of the rasterizing unit is not as limited by RAM bandwidth and latency as it was on the N64 where awful RAM latency meant that tons of things took much longer than they neded (Z-buffering was supposed to be free, but it caused a fill-rate penalty).
I expect other issues, such as the famous 4 KB texture buffer limit of the RDP not to be present.
Z-buffering + perspective corrected textures area step forward from what PSOne and Saturn could do (even though perspective correction issues were not as bad in later PSOne titles).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
snapty00 said:
Lots of polygons which in Super Mario 64 were also in more than a few occasions untextured.
If developers push the DS well, it has the potential of achieving the best people could do on the Nintendo 64 and maybe some more: yes, the N64 had higher theoretical peaks, but in lots of cases extracting something remotely close to those peaks was nearly impossible due to the high RAM latency (N64 used an UMA design... if the main RAM is slow, the whole system will suffer).
The Nintendo 64's main T&L unit was the fixed-point math (not Floating-Point) based RSP Vector Processor (it was programmable like PlayStation 2's VUs in a way [custom micro-code could be uploaded] and not fixed-function like PSOne's GTE).
Bi-linear filtering on the N64 was also a hack: only three texture samples were used to produce the output filtered texel compared to the regular amount of 4 samples (the three samples were arranged in a shape resembling a pyramid IIRC).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Marconelly said:
No
.Lord Error
Insane For Sony
Well, games look like they have perspective corrected textures (at least SM64 does, that's the one I've been mostly watching videos of). Can you post what that developer said?
Also, when I look at N64 SM64 videos, that polygon stability is definitely there, that lead me to believe it had FP math capability. I wish there were some good quality DS videos around.
Also, when I look at N64 SM64 videos, that polygon stability is definitely there, that lead me to believe it had FP math capability. I wish there were some good quality DS videos around.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
snapty00 said:
Well, he is wrong (I would like to see his exact words though, to fully judge what he was trying to say)
.Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Marconelly said:
Likely Nintendo in Super Mario 64 and other 1st--early 2nd generation titles was using an older version of the u-code for the RSP which had higher precision, but lower performance compared to later revisions which boosted performance at the expense of precision.
The DS is an attempt by Nintendo to achieve N64 performance or better on a handheld without overblowing their budget: doing improovements where needed and cutting corners when the benefits outweigh the issues caused by the compromise/corner being cut.
Super Mario 64 DS does not look like a very bad bet was made: draw-distance seems quite nice, frame-rate improoved and so did polygonal and texturing detail (the increase in polygon-count on the main characters is quite noticeable IMHO).
God's Hand
Banned
As fucked up as this sounds, you've convinced me to buy a DS. I was putting it off because I feel Nintendo held back on technology, which they usually don't do, but it doesn't sound as bad as I had imagined.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
God's Hand said:
*Panajev yells: "DO NOT CRUSH ME oh future Emperor of Japan
".Seriously, I think an engineer, an individual like Ken Kutaragi would not hate the DS.
He would think, IMHO, that technology can be pushed further and that portable game consoles should extend the market in a certain direction (the classical "PlayStation" demographic between 14 and 28 primarly and then widening to older and younger demographics) which is why SCE is pushing the PSP, but he would understand that at the end smart engineers worked at the problem "make a N64+ like portable with an X R&D budget (Nintendo did not spend all their R&D money on the DS and they want to make a certain profit off the Hardware or at least ot have minimal losses on each unit sold: this complicates the life of the engineers who have to turn to clever ideas to make the most of the circumsatnces and limitations) Y battery life requirement and Z size and heat requirements" amongst added challenges like WiFi, multiple-screens with one of them being touch sensitive (the use of a sped-up GBA CPU as I/O processor and as handler of the touch-screen), etc...
Rocket Punch
Member
You graphics pundits should do well to get your hands on Spider-man 2 DS just to see what the DS is capable of. Nice solid polys, decent textures at a smooth-as-silk 60 fps. It really is quite something and a nice surprise since it eclipsed Super Mario DS strictly from a visual stand point. The gameplay is linear from A to B but what I really like is how they've used 3D surrounding to add more depth to 2D based gamestyle. I hope other developers follow suit.
Sure, but the PSOne got round the problem in software, wasting polygons to tesselate close-by surfaces. DS doesn't need to do that, so can use all its polys on the world, which is good.
I hated the lack of perspective correction on PSOne more than any other artifact on any platform so far. Nasty nasty nasty.
So the textures are perspective correct? I thought I saw some jitter near the near clip plane that implied they weren't perspective correct, or maybe the clipping algorithm is a bit wonky?
Is this confirmed anywhere?
Edit: OK, I can read (just read more of the thread)... I guess it's fixed point imprecision that's causing the jitter, perhaps?
The screens on the DS are definitely interlaced, from what I can tell...it's apparent if you let something like a fence come to the foreground and move horizontally in Mario 64.
Is this confirmed anywhere?
Edit: OK, I can read (just read more of the thread)...
I guess it's fixed point imprecision that's causing the jitter, perhaps?The screens on the DS are definitely interlaced, from what I can tell...it's apparent if you let something like a fence come to the foreground and move horizontally in Mario 64.
Panajev2001a said:Finally this hit the news... but there is more hidden
Fixed-point math T&L unit is an interesting fact: who knows if they salvaged the RSP (it was not a bad Vector processor, really) or if they went with a newer design...
The important thing is that at least they have perspective corrected texturing and the performance of the rasterizing unit is not as limited by RAM bandwidth and latency as it was on the N64 where awful RAM latency meant that tons of things took much longer than they neded (Z-buffering was supposed to be free, but it caused a fill-rate penalty).
I expect other issues, such as the famous 4 KB texture buffer limit of the RDP not to be present.
Z-buffering + perspective corrected textures area step forward from what PSOne and Saturn could do (even though perspective correction issues were not as bad in later PSOne titles).
Interesting. So the two CPUs are 100% free when it comes to T&L ????
BTW, Who desgined the RSP ? I don't think it was MIPS, was Sylicon Graphics ?
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Argyle said:So the textures are perspective correct? I thought I saw some jitter near the near clip plane that implied they weren't perspective correct, or maybe the clipping algorithm is a bit wonky?
Is this confirmed anywhere?
Edit: OK, I can read (just read more of the thread)...
They are using every trick in the proverbial book to save the bulk of transistor logic for performance and graphics features (blending functions, other Rasterizer tricks).
The use of aggressive fixed-point algorithms for T&L and clipping allows them to achieve higher peak-performance and the faster than N64 RAM (I do think that after all this time they realized that the latency of N64's RAM solution was killing the system's performance: Z-buffering caused an lamost 40-50% drop in peak fill-rate) helps the system to reach higher effective figures.
I am starting to think that the 120K Vertices/s figure (the non-raw performance figure in those Nitro leaked images) assumed the 4 parallel lights and Texture Coordinates Procesing as well as Z-buffering: in other words, counting how much the RAM was keeping the N64 down and what the effective Vertex rate might include... their claim of faster than N64 performance might be true after-all.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
ourumov said:
I would not say 100% free: they likely still have to perform some set-up calculation (give the proper Matrices to the T&L engine for starters) and process the state machine (think about an OpenGL based game running on your PC, is the CPU 100% free from calculations concerning T&L ?).
The RCP, which includes the RSP and the RDP, was designed by SGI which I think already owned MIPS at the time.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
ourumov said:
I do not know... I think they might have gone with a custom Fixed-Point Vector Unit for T&L.
It is a single issue.
Smiles and Cries
Member
thanks for this thread Pana good source of info
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
naz said:thanks for this thread Pana good source of info
Thank you and all the other posters who partecipated in a civil discussion
.
Buggy Loop
Member
Panananana, MSN 
Btw, You told me some more cool tidbits about DS' hardware that you havent said here yet, what's stopping you? It will leak eventually by someone else
Btw, You told me some more cool tidbits about DS' hardware that you havent said here yet, what's stopping you? It will leak eventually by someone else
Justin Bailey
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SPILL IT!Buggy Loop said:Panananana, MSN
Btw, You told me some more cool tidbits about DS' hardware that you havent said here yet, what's stopping you? It will leak eventually by someone else
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Buggy Loop said:Panananana, MSN
Btw, You told me some more cool tidbits about DS' hardware that you havent said here yet, what's stopping you? It will leak eventually by someone else
Cool tidbits ? Oh yes... the DS can make international phones calls and order pizza for you (only Pizza Hut is supported at the moment).
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Justin Bailey said:
There.
Buggy Loop
Member
Panajev2001a said:I have not said anything
Right..
Hope you didnt send Jilleyn to assasinate me!!
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Buggy Loop said:Right..
Hope you didnt send Jilleyn to assasinate me!!
Well, you hoped ... WRONG... MUAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
j/k
...
or am I ?
.