Nintendo 3DS Graphics Chip Revealed, Specifications Inside

June 21st, 2010, 20:59 Posted By: Shrygue

via 1up


There wasn't a lot of talk about hardware specifications during Nintendo's media briefing at E3 last week, and while that may have made for a more interesting presentation, it also left us with plenty of unanswered questions about the 3DS.

Japanese tech company Digital Media Professionals cleared up at least one of those mysteries over the weekend by revealing that it will be providing the graphics chip for Nintendo's new handheld. Rumors suggested that nVidia's Tegra processor would sit at the heart of the 3DS, but it turns out DMP's PICA 200 chip will power the glasses-free 3D in Nintendo's device.

Engadget snagged the demonstration video above from DMP's site. They're reporting that the footage was rendered entirely on the PICA 200 -- needless to say, that would be pretty impressive for a handheld.

We've reproduced the full specifications for the PICA 200 below. If you're the sort of person who isn't immediately baffled by the term "gaseous object rendering," then feel free to dissect these stats to your heart's content:

• Frame buffer: Maximum 4095x4095 pixels
• Pixel format: RGBA4444, RGB565, RGBA5551, RGBA8888
• Vertex program (ARB_vertex_program)
• Render to texture
• Mipmap
• Bilinear texture filtering
• Alpha blending
• Full-scene antialiasing (2x2)
• Polygon offset
• 8-bit stencil buffer
• 24-bit depth buffer
• Single/Double/Triple buffer
• Vertex performance: Maximum 15.3M polygons/sec (at 200MHz)
• Pixel performance: Maximum 800M pixels/sec (at 200MHz)
• DMP MAESTRO technology: per-pixel lighting, procedural texture, refraction mapping, subdivision primitive, shadow, gaseous object rendering

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