Nintendo 3DS’s GPU: DMP’s PICA200
This post/news is too tech-oriented for most people to care about, but I know a lot of technophiles are wondering about the GPU (graphics processing unit) powering Nintendo’s upcoming 3D system. Contrary to those rumors we heard months ago, it’s not Nvidia’s Tegra chip.
A small Tokyo-based firm named Digital Media Professionals (DMP) announced today that Nintendo has chose its PICA200 GPU platform for the 3DS. You can see a short OpenGL ES demonstration video for Pica200 put together by Futuremark four years ago above.
From what I’ve read, the platform is designed to deliver “high detail, high speed, low power consumption real-time 3D graphics”. I can’t really pretend to speak knowledgeably about the GPU, so I’ll paste some details about the PICA200 and screenshots from Futuremark’s “Mikage” demo after the break.
“The PICA200 scales with up to four pipelines and processes from up to four programmable vertex units. The 3D core, using their proprietary graphics technology named MAESTRO-2G, the second generation of the Maestro design, implements custom graphics algorithms as hardware for enabling a set of shading features that include per-vertex sub-surface scattering, bidirectional reflectance distribution function, cook-torrance, polygon subdivision, and soft shadowing.
Their image post-processing module, the PICA-FBM frame buffer management, can polish the image with anti-aliasing and a set of other 2D functions and can actually be licensed independently as a core for 2D-only devices. In either case, the PICA-FBM can be extended with a PICA-VG vector graphics module.”
See also: Pretty much everything you want to know about the God Damn Nintendo 3DS, Observations on the god damn Nintendo 3DS, God damn 3DS Scuttlebutt [Via Neo2046]
