Hardware 3DS vs. OpenPandora

campbell00

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I'm really itching for a new portable to sink my teeth into, and the Pandora and the 3DS came to mind.

I'm aware that hardware specs alone are only half the battle, as performance is heavily reliant on architecture, etc... Still, can someone tell me which if the two are likely to be more powerful?

Pandora specs:
# ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux
# 430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core
# PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware
# 800x480 4.3" 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD
# Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host
# Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output
# Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls
# 43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
# Around 10+ Hours battery life
 

trumpet-205

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Why do you want to compare Pandora vs 3DS? Pandora needs Linux running, so naturally it needs more powerful spec to run it. Pandora and 3DS are two different handhelds for two different purposes.
 

KingVamp

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I want a 3DSPandora
smileipb2.png


Anyway probably the OpenPandora 'cause I think it would need more power for what it made to do...

Pandora is meant to play a bunch of old games while 3DS meant to play a bunch of new games with 3D as a bonus.
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Midna

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The 3DS processors are definitely less powerful. The Graphics chip, however, is very likely far more powerful on the 3DS.

It's Apples and Oranges though, because Pandora is by no means going to have the kind of games the 3DS will. The 3DS has some nice 1st Party support at launch, but the announced 3rd party games are like nothing I've ever seen. And naturally, they're 3D. Pandora has a lot more computer style functions. Multimedia, web browsing, word processing etc. It really depends whether you want a game system or a mini-computer.
 

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Hmm, both are different handhelds. They are on the opposite end of the spectrum. OpenPandora is for emulation, and some user made games. 3DS is for out of the box retail gameplay. As far as I can guess, the 3DS may be hacked later in the 3DS's lifetime. It will be a free hack. Then if my guess is correct, the 3DS will out perform the OpenPandora with stuff it wasn't intended to do. If I were you I would buy both of them if you can. Many of the Emulators written for the Pandora are updated very often... You know if that will sway you any.
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I agree with Midna above. A lot of it will depend on what you are looking for, whereby if you are wanting new gaming experiences and great 1st/3rd party support i'd stick with the 3DS. I wouldn't rely on a hack being found/released on the 3DS anytime soon.

If you are looking for an avenue into getting your old games and emulators into one place, want something that does more than play games, are experimental and into community development, then OpenPandora is definitely for you.

I for one am extremely excited about the 3DS with what has been teased already.
 

Sterling

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jpxdude said:
I agree with Midna above. A lot of it will depend on what you are looking for, whereby if you are wanting new gaming experiences and great 1st/3rd party support i'd stick with the 3DS. I wouldn't rely on a hack being found/released on the 3DS anytime soon.

If you are looking for an avenue into getting your old games and emulators into one place, want something that does more than play games, are experimental and into community development, then OpenPandora is definitely for you.

I for one am extremely excited about the 3DS with what has been teased already.
I guess I should have said very late in it's lifetime. Because if the 3DS's security is anything like the DSi's, it will be pretty tough to crack.

EDIT: Damn typos.
 

Midna

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I forgot to mention, the Pandora does indeed have excellent support for emulators. If that's your thing, and I know it's mine, consider it.
 

ryan90

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I wanted a pandora at first because it looked quite cool with the two sdhc ports, the fact that it was like a portable computer as-well but i already had a psp slim and unless the pandora suddenly gains amazing n64 and DC emulation then i have no interest since psp can already emulate most 2D systems very well, and it has a developer supported ps1 emulator that works better than the real thing in many cases.

The main advantage that it does have though is its high resolution screen, and from what ive read it uses screen filters to give sharper cleaner detail to retro games, it can also upscale the old ps1 games like a pc can making them sharper and less aliased on top of that i imagine its emultors will probably run at a higher frame-rate as well

Pandora has no games of its own however and only homebrew games from the userbase as new content which is why you will never really see the full graphics potential the pandora has, it has the specs of what the PSP2 will probably have but it will never match the games or even the 3ds games, actually it probably can't emulate anything that is even near PSP1 quality. Can it run any linux games? SuperTux Kart?

Edit: i always though the reason the dsi was never hacked was because no-one cared lol, you might not be able to get dsi exclusive games and features but from what i have read none of them are particularly good anyway. I bet that when the 3DS comes around everyone will be trying to hack it and there will probably be some kind of home-brew support by the end of 2011
 

KingVamp

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Midna said:
I forgot to mention, the Pandora does indeed have excellent support for emulators. If that's your thing, and I know it's mine, consider it.
Do you have one?

2011, no no no, 2010 hack before it comes out.
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, but seriously

End of 2011? to early ...
 

Midna

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I followed the project for ages. Damn I wish I had one. I was taken off the batch 1 preorder list because I failed to complete my payment in time. (Someone wouldn't play me back my money...)
 

pachura

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The problem with OpenPandora is that it will never be supported by game developers - it is a niche product. So it's either emulation or nothing.

I think the best of two worlds would be a dedicated Android-based gaming device. Something like iPhone Touch (great hardware, no cellular telephony) with PSP-Go-like controls aimed at gaming. You would have access to all the goods from the Android Market, you would be able to run homebrew out of the box (there's lots of emulators already) and you would have decent internet browser and multimedia capabilities. Throw in a 3D screen from Sharp and I'm buying straight away
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o0ICE0o

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pachura said:
I think the best of two worlds would be a dedicated Android-based gaming device. Something like iPhone Touch (great hardware, no cellular telephony) with PSP-Go-like controls aimed at gaming. You would have access to all the goods from the Android Market, you would be able to run homebrew out of the box (there's lots of emulators already) and you would have decent internet browser and multimedia capabilities. Throw in a 3D screen from Sharp and I'm buying straight away

This is the most perfect idea I've ever herd.
 

KingVamp

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o0ICE0o said:
pachura said:
I think the best of two worlds would be a dedicated Android-based gaming device. Something like iPhone Touch (great hardware, no cellular telephony) with PSP-Go-like controls aimed at gaming. You would have access to all the goods from the Android Market, you would be able to run homebrew out of the box (there's lots of emulators already) and you would have decent internet browser and multimedia capabilities. Throw in a 3D screen from Sharp and I'm buying straight away

This is the most perfect idea I've ever herd.

Yea call it the gamedroid
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cwstjdenobs

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Like someone said earlier this is a bit of an oranges and apples thing. But I'd say that the Pandora is probably a smidgen more powerful as it's GPU can do shaders, but I can't find any details on the 3DSs CPU/s or any co-processors, and they are a big deal on ARM based systems. For example with the DSP being used the Beagleboard can handle HD video very well, without it it stutters like hell. The XM is meant to be even better but I haven't got mine yet
frown.gif


This http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o4y9k0s_Xc is pretty much nullDC on the Pandora (well Beagleboard but as good as). I think the project is dead now or moved home, it's been a while since I checked it.

And if you aren't happy with plain linux there's an OMAP3 port of android.

But as a few people have said, this really isn't an either or situation. You want what both can do you need both. You can't afford both you'll need to chose which features you want more and settle with it or get the one you want most first.
 

Midna

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The 3DS GPU, the Pica200, definitely has support for hardware shaders. Current unconfirmed leaks suggest the 3DS is running twin 200MHz ARM11 processors. Even with two of them, that's still less powerful than a Cortex A8, I'd wager. But the Pica200 is a beast, it really is.

ws4d3l.jpg

MAESTRO shaders are pretty nice, actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICA200#Specification

Look there, for shaders, it's got...
per pixel lighting
procedural texture
refraction mapping
subdivision primitive
shadow
gaseous object rendering
 

lostdwarf

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Midna said:
The 3DS GPU, the Pica200, definitely has support for hardware shaders. Current unconfirmed leaks suggest the 3DS is running twin 200MHz ARM11 processors. Even with two of them, that's still less powerful than a Cortex A8, I'd wager. But the Pica200 is a beast, it really is.

ws4d3l.jpg

MAESTRO shaders are pretty nice, actually.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PICA200#Specification

Look there, for shaders, it's got...
per pixel lighting
procedural texture
refraction mapping
subdivision primitive
shadow
gaseous object rendering


this chip pica will be great for 3ds and games will look fantastic
here's some I pulled from wiki, makes good reading... some I could not find.

Per-pixel lighting
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In computer graphics, per-pixel lighting is commonly used to refer to a set of methods for computing illumination at each rendered pixel of an image. These generally produce more realistic images than vertex lighting, which only calculates illumination at each vertex of a 3D model and then interpolates the resulting values to calculate the per-pixel color values.

Per-pixel lighting is commonly used with other computer graphics techniques to help improve render quality, including bump mapping, specularity, phong shading, and shadow volumes.

Real-time applications, such as computer games, which use modern graphics cards, will normally implement per-pixel lighting algorithms using pixel shaders. Per-pixel lighting is also performed on the CPU in many high-end commercial rendering applications which typically do not render at interactive framerates.

Procedural texture
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
A procedural floor grate texture generated with the texture editor Genetica.
A procedural texture is a computer generated image created using an algorithm intended to create a realistic representation of natural elements such as wood, marble, granite, metal, stone, and others.
Usually, the natural look of the rendered result is achieved by the usage of fractal noise and turbulence functions. These functions are used as a numerical representation of the “randomness” found in nature.

refraction mapping (ray tracing)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_tracing_%28graphics%29
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3122...pping_part_.php

Self-shadowing
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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This article is about computer graphics lighting effect.
Doom 3's unified lighting and shadowing allows for self-shadowing via shadow volumes
Self-Shadowing is a computer graphics lighting effect, used in 3D rendering applications such as computer animation and video games. Self-shadowing allows non-static objects in the environment, such as game characters and interactive objects (buckets, chairs, etc), to cast shadows on themselves and each other. For example, without self-shadowing, if a character puts his or her right arm over the left, the right arm will not cast a shadow over the left arm. If that same character places a hand over a ball, that hand will not cast a shadow over the ball.
 

pachura

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Let's circlejerk some more over a graphics chip which noone has ever seen in real life, which probably is going to be downclocked to save battery life, which doesn't do OpenGL 2.0 and doesn't have programmable pixel shaders. There are chances that every game will have the same look because of limited set of embedded shaders coders can choose from... no, really. The fact that there is a Pica200 version capable of 400 Mpix/s doesn't necessarily mean that this exact model will be used in 3DS.
 

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Leaving specs out for a moment, consider this. The Pandora was a product designed three years ago, more or less. Simply put, it's dated. Things that made sense back then really don't make as much sense today. The hardware keyboard, for example, is something that is IMO unnecessary and only adds to the bulks of the machine. With iOS and Android finally becoming mainsteam and well supported, it won't be long until some kind of detachable controller comes out for a lot of devices that can already have the software. (I know about iControlPad, but I haven't followed the project in a while)
 

Midna

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pachura said:
Let's circlejerk some more over a graphics chip which noone has ever seen in real life, which probably is going to be downclocked to save battery life, which doesn't do OpenGL 2.0 and doesn't have programmable pixel shaders. There are chances that every game will have the same look because of limited set of embedded shaders coders can choose from... no, really. The fact that there is a Pica200 version capable of 400 Mpix/s doesn't necessarily mean that this exact model will be used in 3DS.
Prove it.
 

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