Tuesday 13 December 2011

How much Grpahics can the 3ds Pump out?

Well now. This has been quite a debate for many. People have considered and concluded that the 3ds is either on par with the PSP or the XBOX. I stumbled across something on Wikipedia that seemed to confirm my calculations.
The Gamecube pumped out about 40m polygons, or triangles per second. Well, at least that's what resident evil 4 was running. I also calculated the Wii to pump out some 60m. This holds true, given the Wii was upgraded from the Gamecube on a 1.5 scale.

How did i get these figure? Easy. To get the number of polygons, divide the fill rate by 32, which indicates a 32 pixel triangle (that is, each triangle will be made up of 32 pixels). The Wii fill rate is at 1944 mega pixels, which gives about 60.75m polygons. See the funny thing here. Multiply the Gamecube's 40m by 1.5 and see bow many polygons will be pumped out. 60m.

I tried the same thing with the 3ds, and i arrived at some astonishing figures. The 3ds fill rate is currently at about 1.6 billion pixels, or 1600 mega pixels. I saw this on the internet. But i also calculated it myself. Fill rate is calculated by multiplying gpu clock rate by the number of pixel pipelines. The 3ds has 4 pixel pipelines and 4 vertex pipelines. So 200Mhz * (4 pixel pipelines + 4 vertex pipelines) gives us 1600 mega pixels.  Divide this by 32 pixels and you will arrive at 50m polygons. It could seem mythical, since i don't even have a 3ds or have not even studied computer science. But I confirmed it.

On Wikipedia, The 3ds gpu was was stated to pump out 40m triangles or polygons at 100mhz. I got some information that the 3ds was down-scaled from 200mhz to 133mhz. So i did some more calculations. Lets see how many polygons the gpu can pump out at 1mhz. That (40m/100mhz) will give us 400 000 polygons. Now multiply that by 133mhz. That will give us 53.2m polygons.

That means that the 3ds stands firmly between the Gamecube and Wii in terms of polycount. But it will readily pump out better visuals than the Wii because it has it's own shader unit, that helps it create shaders and textures of a near 360 caliber. Capcom have already stated that they can produce near Resident Evil 5 visuals on the 3ds. That's quite some power packed into a little glossy box.