Nintendo's 3DS Specs Too Low for Epic's Unreal Engine
- Thread starter Greg Tito
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While it's good you know how to look at and compare postive integers with similar units, you fall into a fairly common trap of assuming that the numbers are equivalent.aaaaaDisregard said:
First off, remember that while the R4000 CPU in the PSP can hit 333MHz, it's intentionally clocked at 222 because of power and heat.
Second, you would do well to remember that comparing raw numbers like CPU clock and GPU poly rendering becomes highly misleading even between devices in the same generation. I can't be the only one who remembers how Pentium 4s stacked up against Athlons with much lower core clocks. In this particular case, the R4000 design is from the early 90s (these things were in SGI's Indy for crying out loud). While the R4000 does feature a superscalar design, barrel-shifter, and single-clock execution (for everything that isn't division or SqRt); it unfortunately doesn't include many of the common innovations found in the intervening decade. New approaches to instruction parallelism, OOE, improvements to pipelining, multiple ISA revisions.... as you can see, it's hardly a simple apples to apples comparison. And the 3DS has two of these.
Further, The Pica200 is much more powerful than their old marketing pdf would indicate. The updated specs place it at around 400Mps fill and 40Mt at 100MHz.[1] At 200MHz (nominally what Nintendo is packing), it might even best the PS2 (which was difficult to program, but really was a poly-pushing monster. Raw performance only exceeded by the Gamecube, as I recall) and certainly towers over the PSP.
You are, however, correct that the Cortex-A8 is a brilliant piece of kit.
Does Epic make games? Rarely. Does Epic make games worth playing? Not since 1999. That might have something to do with it. :/jamesworkshop said:
Note the screen scale. Much smaller framebuffer, lower texture resolution, likely a compressed colour space to save bits (555 like the DS?). Also, it manages to do everything much much faster than the Mach-series VGA cards....dochmbi said:
[1] http://people.csail.mit.edu/kapu/EG_08/Mobile3D_EG08.pdf
"it unfortunately doesn't include many of the common innovations found in the intervening decade... OOE"WyattEpp said:
Oh my god, you've mentioned out of order execution*facepalm*.
Since when exactly does ARMv6 support this magnificent feature? As far as I know even X360's and PS3's PowerPC processors don't possess its power. And so you know, ARMv6 is a scalar architecture without those pretty NEON instructions. Meanwhile PSP has vector FPU in addition to regular FPU.
While comparing "postive integers with similar units" can be deceptive, it certainly gives rough estimate of power and functionality.
While you have good enough memory to remember AMD's K7 architecture and its edge over Netburst, you are too fast to forget about Athlon XP's 3 FPU pipelines and shorter execution pipeline.
You also forget that this funny MIPS R4000 was quite advanced for the beginning of 90s - I'd say it was much more advanced than Intel 80486, which is about the same level of complexity with ARMv6 CPUs like the one supposedly installed in Nintendo 3DS.
And the last one - you're clearly far from being very knowledgeable about PSP hardware - otherwise you'd know that its CPU can reach 333MHz with updated firmware which was released alongside God Of War - Chains Of Olympus.
As for GPU - I didn't imply it was advanced - 3DS's one is much better, especially in terms of capabilities, but it still isn't magnitudes better. Not very impressive, considering that PSP will celebrate its 6th anniversary soon.
Congrats. You just re-iterated the exact same post as last time. Let me lay it out for you in a language you can understand. THE SPECS OF A CONSOLE MEAN NOTHING. ALL THAT MATTERS IS THE SOFTWARE...YOU KNOW?....THE GAMES!!!...It's incredible how people like you ignore the fact that almost every single Nintendo game ever made is better than anything I've seen on 360 minus Portal. They actually make games that are CREATIVE and (god-forbid) have COLOR. They don't feel the need to impress those like you who are too shallow to look past a game's graphics and see what actually makes it unique and FUN. And once again, saying that touchscreen control is "cheap and pointless" is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've ever heard. And anybody who denies that motion control is better for certain software (RPG's, RTS', point and click, internet browser...basically anything that has menu screens) is also either incredibly stupid/uneducated. And 3d...3d will add to the medium about 10x more than HD ever did. You'd honestly rather your screen look like a photo instead of a window into your gaming world (probably all sports sims and shooters) through which you can see for miles into the distance? (look up sterioscopic vision and educate yourself...lol u think it's akin to a "Magic Eye" book...lmao you're ignorant on the subject your complaining about...the ultimate form of immaturity)Xanthious said:
Everything you've said so far indicates that you're shallow, conservative, self-conscious and insecure, or completely ignorant. Stop living in the past.
This is the first time I've ever modified a quote in any way, so I hope it turns out right. Most of the time when I use caps it's to italicize or emphasize a word, but that long one in the beginning was due to slight irritation for apparently having failed to get my point across...I don't ever want to appear to be yelling or angry in my text. Also, what does TLDR mean?Xanthious said:
With the Wii out there, are people really so suprised?
And while I absolutely adore my iTouch, it does have a "Meh" library. There are some great games on here if you look hard enough. But its Media first, hard-core games... somewhere down the priority list.
Of course, now that I've admitted that I am happy with my Apple product, the internet is going to proceed to insult me for it like it does when I say I game on a Macbook.
Because the fact that this is the way I like my computer situation, and I've used PCs for years- more than long enough to form an opinion with -people like to go, "NO, you're WRONG. MY way of doing things are better. It doesn't matter that you're happy with what you have, you really AREN'T. These are the reasons why: *insert rationale here*. Why don't you go do things MY way, huh?"
And then whenever I make a comment about how I don't like being irked by anti-Apple people, someone then quotes me and goes, "But they're right." I then giggle when they get moderated for a smartass, low-content post. (Yes, I am tired of hearing that, why do you ask?)
Still, they're not right. Whether its the 3DS or a Macbook, Its not about Goddamned technical specs, its about enjoying your machine.
Except for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I feel bad about not being able to enjoy that thing.
And while I absolutely adore my iTouch, it does have a "Meh" library. There are some great games on here if you look hard enough. But its Media first, hard-core games... somewhere down the priority list.
Of course, now that I've admitted that I am happy with my Apple product, the internet is going to proceed to insult me for it like it does when I say I game on a Macbook.
Because the fact that this is the way I like my computer situation, and I've used PCs for years- more than long enough to form an opinion with -people like to go, "NO, you're WRONG. MY way of doing things are better. It doesn't matter that you're happy with what you have, you really AREN'T. These are the reasons why: *insert rationale here*. Why don't you go do things MY way, huh?"
And then whenever I make a comment about how I don't like being irked by anti-Apple people, someone then quotes me and goes, "But they're right." I then giggle when they get moderated for a smartass, low-content post. (Yes, I am tired of hearing that, why do you ask?)
Still, they're not right. Whether its the 3DS or a Macbook, Its not about Goddamned technical specs, its about enjoying your machine.
Except for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I feel bad about not being able to enjoy that thing.
People don't seem to take into consideration that a good portion of the RAM and such will be taken up by the system's OS. Whereas the 3DS has a very meager OS system that takes up very little space.
Also, remember that the 3DS is made by a company that actually produces games and publishes games made third party. The iphone does not, most of it's games are little better the glorified flash games.
Also, remember that the 3DS is made by a company that actually produces games and publishes games made third party. The iphone does not, most of it's games are little better the glorified flash games.
I'm more concerned about the screen resolution, I wouldn't expect smart phone standard but it's looking pretty woeful. Probably the reason why it seems underpowered but i don't see much better detail being achieved on a standard ds screen.
It isn't a standard DS screen. The 3D top screen is twice the resolution of a DS screen and that's after it deals with stereoscopy (its almost 4 times the resolution natively). Even the resolution of the lower screen is 50% higher then a standard DS display.chinomareno said:
The reason people think its underpowered is because they really don't know anything about 3D technology, its certainly not down to the way launch games are looking. RE and MGS are two of the best, if not the best looking, handheld games I've ever seen.
Rein's been saying the same thing about Nintendo consoles for years. The fact that people are taking what he's saying about them seriously is laughable. The guy's basically just a massive troll.
Oh please. The N64 was crippled by the cartridge vs CD issue, (and thus a lack of storage for detailed textures, sounds and so on.).Xanthious said:
That aside it had better hardware than the Playstation, it's only competitor.
It was quite capable of graphical effects a playstation couldn't cope with, but of course, when you have 600 mb to store textures and such vs 8 to 32 mb, it's obvious that there's going to be problems with detail.
The N64 is mass-produced silicon graphics hardware. It wasn't underpowered, it just had an unfortunate design compromise in sticking with cartridges as a storage medium.
(Great for loading times, but awful for most everything else)