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Nintendo 3DS uses DMP's PICA200 GPU
Instead of going with the rumored Nvidia Tegra chip to power the display in the 3DS, Nintendo has chosen a product from Digital Media Professionals. The Japanese hardware company announced last night that its PICA200 chip was selected by Nintendo as the GPU in the Nintendo 3DS. DMP boasts that the 200MHz chip can provide 15.3 million polygons a second, 800 million pixels a second, and can perform alpha blending, full-scene antialiasing, and other features that sound like they make nice graphics. Nintendo has yet to reveal the CPU or any of the other chips behind the 3DS, but at least we're starting to get an idea what's going on in there. After the break, check out a video made by DMP to show off the chip's abilities. Perhaps you can look at it on two monitors at once to get an idea of the 3D capabilities of the system, or wiggle your monitor back and forth.
DMP's Pica200 GPU is the power behind Nintendo 3DS (video)
We'd never heard of Digital Media Professionals until this very moment, but we'd guess the company won't have that problem in future -- according to a press release fresh off the Japanese wire, its Pica200 GPU is the one pushing pixels to Nintendo's autostereoscopic screen. While we don't know exactly how the tiny graphics unit works or what CPU it might be paired with in a system-on-a-chip, the company claims it supports per-pixel lighting, procedural textures and antialiasing among a host of other effects, and generates 15.3 million polygons per second at its native 200MHz. What's more impressive is the video after the break -- reportedly rendered entirely on the chip -- and of course, the 3DS itself, but you'll have to take our word on that.
