Nintendo patents in displacement mapping discovered

Patent-surfing is the latest trend when trying to find out what console manufacturers are up to—some patents (and trademarks) give away a lot of information, but others are just red herrings or
reveal little about the future. While Nintendo have been cagey about releasing the specifications for the Revolution, an eagle-eyed blogger from Germany has uncovered a patent that may tell us more about its graphical capabilities.

Nintendo have filed two patents relating to displacement mapping, a technique for rendering detailed surfaces while keeping the polygon count low. One involves specialist hardware for vector operations, optimising the graphics hardware so that displacement mapping is computed efficiently;
the other relates to reducing the strain on the CPU caused by rendering a 3D world in 2D.

It's fairly likely that the Revolution will adopt this technology to some extent—an industry insider commented, when questioned, that advances in graphics technology, especially optimisations, are to be expected for the next generation and are "interesting, but not revolutionary".

[Thanks, Soothsayer]