Reports: 3DS more powerful than Wii, doesn't use Nvidia chips

by JC Fletcher on Jun 7th 2010 1:00PM

Reports from anonymous sources are starting to paint a rather surprising picture of the mysterious Nintendo 3DS. Both IGN and Eurogamer report that developers have said off-the-record that the handheld won't use the Nvidia Tegra chip, as it was rumored to do. Eurogamer's sources claim that the 3DS hardware is internally known as "CTR," suggesting that the motherboard image submitted to the FCC in May, which noted the "CTR" codename, was indeed related to the 3DS.

According to IGN, "Several developers that have experienced 3DS in its current form have reported, off the record, that it has processing capabilities that far exceed the Nintendo Wii and bring the device with abilities that are close to HD consoles such as PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360."

We'll find out for ourselves when Nintendo unveils the thing at E3, but this sounds rather uncharacteristic. Nintendo's handhelds have always been designed to use not-quite-cutting-edge technology, to keep costs down and battery life long. We suppose a certain level of processing power is required to generate 3D imagery, especially on two screens, but if these reports are true, the 3DS would represent a totally new strategy for Nintendo.

Source: Eurogamer
Source: IGN

Tags: 3DS, CTR, ds, Eurogamer, IGN, nintendo, Nintendo-CTR, Nvidia, Nvidia-Tegra

Reader Comments (134)

"The processors in the PS3 and 360 are several years old, and many better processors and refinement technologies have debuted that make them more outdated than they were when they were launched."

your post is full of obvious. especially this one -_-

PS3 and 360 keep getting updated revisions that continually move to
smaller dies to reduce cost and produce new form factors (PS3 slim,
etc). Moore's law isn't going to make them work in a handheld for a
long time though.

The Wii is nearly handheld already, and only consumes 18 watts tops
vs like 200 something watts for PS3/Xbox. So with the DVD drive
removed, a Wii-like handheld may be feasible.

Obvious? Maybe. But the amount of knee-jerks to this news makes the point relevant.

And I'm sorry, unless you keep up to date with processor technologies, 3D rendering, handheld resolutions and the like, not much of that is "obvious." The fact that gravity is actually the distortion of the space-time continuum by super massive objects such as planets and suns may be obvious to a theoretical physicist, but it's not obvious to most people.

Logic, it seems he was trying to have a discussion on issues and your comment was just to be a d*ck. So, obvious or not, at least he had something to say.

It's a good thing I read down through the third page of comments before my "knee-jerk" reaction kicked in.

As long as it has this layout http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/FCKEditorFiles//3ds-impression-7%281%29.jpg and can output to TV I will destory the world for it!!!!111

No. Just. No.

Destory? No!! God loves stories!!!

Well whatever they go with I was a single large touch screen and 2 ana nubs and a TV out..... >>

Ahem....Holy Poop!

So it's 3 GameCube's duct taped together? I kid. Can't wait to see this bad boy in action.

I still think it must use point cloud data then.

"We suppose a certain level of processing power is required to generate 3D imagery, especially on two screens, but if these reports are true, the 3DS would represent a totally new strategy for Nintendo"

Except that didn't Nintendo already announce that only one screen would be actually "3D"?

However unlikely it sounds that Nintendo would create such a powerful device based on their history, this could be Nintendo acknowledging the need for taking the next step before Apple's iPhone line starts taking too big of a "gaming" chunk from Nintendo. Nintendo might need a bit of a new strategy. Just like with the Wii's successor, I have no doubt that rather than "innovate" like the Wii did, it will simply evolve, to have better motion controls with far better processing power to create stunning visuals that rival the competitions (and I don't mean this generations competition, I mean next generations...) - still, that's probably a good 2-3 years away.

The 3DS does not have the equivalent processing power of the PS3 or the 360 period. The comment was taken out of context and made in haste by hyped up developers and for all we know, these "developers" may not even be from their respective technical departments.

Close to the PS3 and 360 in a handheld? So much for battery life.

Much like the Matrix, 3DS runs off human bio-energy. Just plug in the Vitality Sensor.

ZippyDSMlee @ Jun 7th 2010 2:06PM

How about build it the best you can then use that hardware as a base for both portable and console markets. Its portable out of the box but with a console addon it can easily attach to the TV and offers more control and game disc/format options!!

----------------

Lol, come to you senses ZippyDSMlee! That would be a groundbreaking (and reasonable) new idea! Who would want to concentrate all their R&D money on one central system! Why would anybody want to consolidate their efforts on one system when they can split it into two systems! Why would ANYBODY want to plug their system into a TV and have an option for wireless gaming controllers to play their multiplayer console games with friends from one console on the big screen while the next day taking your system on a train ride to work. I'm sorry but that would make too much sense and only a gaming company that has a long history of successful gaming innovation would attempt such foolishness*

*Obvious sarcasm:)

I think that the best thing to come of this is the possibility of SSB64 Emulation...

Or buy a Wii and download it?

I think it goes without saying if the console is more powerful than the Wii, it'll be able to fully access the entire current Virtual Console library and hopefully allow portable play of VC games from someones own Wii.

all this talk about being powerful.. they better have good battery life.

Guys, powerful or not, remember the company line:

"We only push the hardware when we have an idea that we couldn't do before"

Wii+ graphics or not, I'm interested to see if there was some type of awesome software they had in mind when they developed this, ala the Wii and DS.

It may need a good deal of raw graphical power, given what we know about the hit on actual graphical acuity that 3D provides, so this may be the case, but i severely doubt it.

Nintendo's going to be focused on more than raw power. They're going to try and make the 3DS into a lifestyle device, and that can't be prohibitively expensive.

Close to PS3/60? Yeah, no.

If this isn't using Tegra (that'd be Tegra 1, obviously), I strongly suspect it'll be based on a similar system-on-chip. Think Snapdragon or one of the others with a less, er, snappy brand name... (OMAP-whatever, for instance.) The CPUs on these (Cortex A8 on the newer models), while still single-core, are similar to Wii in power; I'd assume the GPUs are better.

Reason for suspicion: er, given that it's claimed to have a lot more power than DS (so ruling out 'incremental upgrade') there's not really anything else out there except ARM-based SoCs in the low-battery-consumption range.

These systems don't approach PS3/60. Cortex A8 running at between 600MHz and 1GHz is a good mobile processor, but compare that against three 3.2 GHz PowerPCs? (Or against Sony's odd but similarly powerful processor?) Not a contest. And the GPU situation is similar - but, given the presumably large difference in screen resolution between a pair of 3DS screens one of which typically won't be doing much, and ~640p, maybe that's why they're claiming it approaches that level.

...Okayyyy....

Not a chance. I can see something that will reach PS2 and Gamecube level tech towards the end of its lifetime, but there's no way Nintendo is gonna come out with a handheld that's more powerful then their console. Not a chance. Especially with rumors pointing to the next PSP being only as powerful as the Wii anyway.

I'm guessing that only 1 screen is going to be 3D. My reasoning is as such: The board we saw in the FCC leak only had one screen that fit the sharp parallax screen dimensions. Also: go watch a 3D movie, now put your hand out in front of your face. See how obnoxious it is to have the 3D effect interrupted? Yeah.

@Kyle

"3D rendering is a bit more difficult than regular, flat images, so the processor would need more power than a 2D console to render the same quality picture with the same amount of polygons and textures."

It's likely that I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about here, but my understanding is that the 3-D effect will be taken care of by "splitting" the flat image into two different viewing angles with a physical overlay-type concept thingy, kinda like those old 3-D baseball cards you used to get in Frosted Flakes (but hopefully much, MUCH better).

Wouldn't that mean that each eye simply gets "half" of an image, and therefore "half" the resolution? Meaning that any processing power for graphics only has to be twice that of the current DS (which is no biggie) to provide the same resolution in 3-D?

My toaster is more powerful than the Wii.

Not more powerful, just uses more electricity.

More powerful than the Wii, so the 3DS is three Gamecubes duct taped together?

What's oddest is this: that so many commenters are shrieking "ZOMG, BS, Nintendo doesn't add cutting edge horsepower to their shit!"

Kiddies, kiddies, kiddies: PS3 and 360 are NOT cutting edge. They are FIVE YEAR OLD TECH.

Let's just suppose that 3DS comes close--doesn't quite get to the level of PS3 and 360, but just close enough that on small screens it's similar looking--that in no way requires "cutting edge" technology. It only requires 5 year old technology, which, if you want to assume Nintendo doesn't do top notch (which, I'll remind you, this is the first console generation where they *didn't* do high end hardware but focused on features instead), works out just fine.
You can get PS3/360 visuals with old tech. MS and Sony do it daily.

the claims of the tegra 2 chip are the graphical ball park of what they are talking about and it is also considered a battery friendly chip. I know they said they wouldn't be using nvidia but I'm just saying that the technology is out there to make this possible.

This statement makes complete sense, and is as expected from nintendo. The "more powerfull than PS3" bit was a lot out of reach.

Basically 3DS enables nintendo compete on a level technological ground with PSP, A 5 year old device.

without a decent resolution, tons of processing power wont really matter too much.

games @ 480x320 vs 1280x760 vs 1920x1080 are all wholly different.

i wouldnt turn away a handheld metroid fps with tons of volumetric smoke, particle physics and mature ai, though, even at 480x320.

Previous 50 Comments

Reports: 3DS more powerful than Wii, doesn't use Nvidia chips

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