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Why Nintendo chose DMP's PICA200 GPU for the 3DS - technical details and insight

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Soumya Deb

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Posted on 14-07-2010
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So, we have got ourselves a winner... the Nintendo 3DS will be the first handheld gaming platform to provide a full stereoscopic 3D gaming experience without any need of those pesky 3D glasses. Let's face it, nobody likes to wear those clown looking goggles, but we have to, because in order to experience stereoscopic 3D (s3D from now on...) with the technology that is mainly available for consumers (passive filtering of s3D), spectators are compelled to adopt some form or the other 3D image splitting for either eyes.


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While watching movies in theaters or at home, or gaming in a fully static environment, these solutions are the most feasible ones, although annoying. But, it's obvious that nobody will ever like a portable gaming device that requires a bi-chromatic spectacle. If you have to wear it whenever-wherever you want to play a game on the device, it'd render you as seemingly insane when seen in the wide open outdoor. So what was the solution?

That is where Nintendo came to the rescue. The all new Nintendo 3DS has a revolutionary new technology that will produce complete s3D for the user with the help of a new graphics IP core from Digital Media Professionals (DMP), named PICA200, and a display screen that can produce two different images of a scene for stereoscopic vision.

 

Technical Specification

Nintendo 3DS Specification PICA200 tech-spec DMP MAESTRO features
  • Form factor : 5.3"x2.9"x0.8"
  • Weight : 8 ounces
  • Primary screen : 3.53" 3D display with 800x240 resolution (400x240 for each eye)
  • Touch screen : 3.02" non-3D display with 320x240 resolution
  • Three (one inner, two outer) VGA cameras of 0.3MP resolution (640x480 pixel)
  • WiFi at 2.4GHz band with WPA/WPA2 encryption
  • Li-ion batteries
  • Upto 2GB game card support
  • 3D video playback support
  • Accelerometer, gyroscope and 3D depth slider
  • Frame buffer : 4095 x 4095 pixel maximum
  • Pixel format : RGBA4444, RGB565, RGBA5551, RGBA8888
  • Vertex program (ARB_vertex_program)
  • Render to texture
  • mipmap
  • Bilinear texture filtering
  • Alpha blending
  • Full-screen antialiasing 2x2
  • Polygon offset
  • 8-bit stencil buffer
  • 24-bit depth buffer
  • Single/double/triple buffer
  • Vertex fill rate : 15.3M polygon/sec
  • Pixel fill rate : 800M pixel/sec
  • Per-pixel lighting

  • Procedural texture

  • Refraction mapping

  • Subdivision primitive

  • Shadow

  • Gaseous object rendering

Insight of the graphics IP core and Maestro API

Being showcased first in SIGGRAPH 2006, the IP core of PICA200 was developed by DMP with three things in mind:

  • The IP core must support a wide colour gamut to support all embedded system displays (from tiny mobile phone to the large amusement console displays)
  • 3D graphics hardware must have huge bandwidth for command, texture, color and z-buffer read/write access (as this bandwidth determines the performance of 3D IP core), and
  • IP core should be easy to integrate in an SoC system environment.

 

 

These were the primary reason for going Open Chip Protocol (OCP 2.2) specification for the development process. The biggest advantage of using OCP is to utilize the core optimization (for better Maestro performance regarding the device needs), resource pre-fetching, better memory access etc. and being an open standard, OCP also provides good understandability for both IP provider and x manufacturer.



The key factor towards attaining this performance level as well as being energy efficient is the Maestro graphics API, which is able to juice out every single drop of OpenGL ES 1.1. It provides the developers with a library of massively used and nice looking elements/functions (for example - shaders, light elements, even shape primitives) for them to use directly to create rich graphics, thereby reducing the need of writing/scripting these elements. Check out the images to understand the features of Lighting, Shadow, Figure, Mapping and Particle Maestro.

 

Listed under tags :

wii , nvidia , ati , 3d , graphics , camera , opengl , api , sony , games , display , energy , arm , fps , mapping , ip , nintendo , tegra , mobile phone , 3-d , vga , nvidia tegra , graphics chipset , nintendo ds , nintendo dsi , autostereoscopy , autostereoscopic tv , opengl es , stereoscopic , graphics processor , opengl es 2.0 , 3 d , sony psp , nintendo 3ds , 3ds , gaming console , goggles , soc , stereoscopic 3d , mobile handsets , shadow , sony psp 2 , energy consumption , nintendo games , nintendo 3ds hardware , nintendo 3ds release date , nintendo 3ds system , nintendo 3ds price , nintendo 3ds release , pica200 , pica200 gpu , energy efficiency , gaming device , dmp , maestro , siggraph , gamut , ocp , opengl es 1.1 , binocular , sweet spot

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