Hardware 3DS Max Battery Life

[bigpaws]

i think it is ok since im either in the car-car charger
at home- plug it in and play to hearts content
on a trip-various plugins in places

the only thing that bugs me is that it may take 3.5 hrs to charge
that is the reason they gave us a dock so we charge it at night when we sleep 7+ hrs

 

[koji2009]

That 8 is is probably if you get really lucky. Does turning off 3D even do anything regarding saving power? I thought I read in a previous thread that the framerate would double which would mean the CPU would be doing the same amount of work anyway.

You're wrong... There is no doubling, the 3d isn't interleaved... It's progressive. That means that the system's refresh rate is ALWAYS 60hz... whether 3d is on or off. Whether a game runs at 30 or 60 or 15 fps is all up to the complexity of the game and the developers goal for the game... 3d on or not.

FPS lowering when in 3D mode has been confirmed on an interview.

Reading comprehension fail. Go back and reread the article carefully and tell me what it says.


Too lazy? All right, I'll tell you then. It said that when 3d is on there is a reduction in frames per second possible. This is a no brainer. The developer said that with 2d on they may get game A to run fully at 60fps, but if they then set it to 3d they have to drop the frame rate because of the strain on the system.... Think of it another way, say in 2d mode they have the same game running at 30fps, to make that now a 3d game they may have to drop the FPS to 15.

In other words, just like on the PS3 or a PC... the moment you render the same image twice, you're putting near double the workload on the video hardware and you can expect performance loss. That is not to say that it's impossible to get a full 3d game running at 60fps, only that it's harder than getting a 2d running at 60fps which shouldn't be a surprise at all.

 

[DiscostewSM]

That 8 is is probably if you get really lucky. Does turning off 3D even do anything regarding saving power? I thought I read in a previous thread that the framerate would double which would mean the CPU would be doing the same amount of work anyway.

You're wrong... There is no doubling, the 3d isn't interleaved... It's progressive. That means that the system's refresh rate is ALWAYS 60hz... whether 3d is on or off. Whether a game runs at 30 or 60 or 15 fps is all up to the complexity of the game and the developers goal for the game... 3d on or not.

FPS lowering when in 3D mode has been confirmed on an interview.

Reading comprehension fail. Go back and reread the article carefully and tell me what it says.


Too lazy? All right, I'll tell you then. It said that when 3d is on there is a reduction in frames per second possible. This is a no brainer. The developer said that with 2d on they may get game A to run fully at 60fps, but if they then set it to 3d they have to drop the frame rate because of the strain on the system.... Think of it another way, say in 2d mode they have the same game running at 30fps, to make that now a 3d game they may have to drop the FPS to 15.

In other words, just like on the PS3 or a PC... the moment you render the same image twice, you're putting near double the workload on the video hardware and you can expect performance loss. That is not to say that it's impossible to get a full 3d game running at 60fps, only that it's harder than getting a 2d running at 60fps which shouldn't be a surprise at all.

Somewhat offtopic....

Like you described, it is based on the hardware. Most video hardware handles graphics with frame buffers. An exception to this is the DS. The DS does not render polygons the same way that most video hardware does. It didn't have a full-frame buffer that drew the polygons the moment the data was sent to the hardware. It stored finalized polygon/vertex data in one of two buffers, with one buffer rendering to the screen at the scanline level alongside the refresh rate (refreshing 60 times a second) on only the main display, and the other takes in new polygon/vertex data. That is why you may see some tearing in games with a lot of large polygons in one specific area. The buffers could then be swapped (At the start of the VBlank), so their jobs would swap also to show animation. Because the DS could only render alongside the refresh rate, it had it's limit of 60 rendered frames a second, meaning when it had to render polygons to both screens, it could only do it at half the frame rate by using the capture unit to store one render, and display that as an image while the video hardware was rendering the other screen with polygons.

From what I can see, the 3DS doesn't use that method for it's games (though it obviously mimics it when in DS mode), because if it did, then games like Nintendogs + Cats would run at a maximum of 20fps when in 3D mode because it would be rendering 3 frames in 3 refresh cycles, 2 for the 3D effect, and one for the silhouette on the bottom screen.

 

[luke_c]

I would hardly call this good news as the whole point of the 3DS is 3D gaming on the go, and if you can't see the screen when in broad daylight and have the 3D turned off, what's the point?

 

[DiscostewSM]

I would hardly call this good news as the whole point of the 3DS is 3D gaming on the go, and if you can't see the screen when in broad daylight and have the 3D turned off, what's the point?

Would you rather there be no option for 3D, or have 3D on all the time? The GPU is working double-time to render 3D, so it makes sense that it requires more power to accomplish that.

 

[ProtoKun7]

I don't get what's the big deal about this.
My DS lites only give 3-5 hours at the second the highest brightness setting, while using a flash cart with non-HC microSD. 3DS is reported to be the same.

Seriously?

I usually have it on the second lowest but I got a lot more out of it.

 

[Relys]

3D requires the GPU to render two full 3D images which takes up a lot of processing. It's no surprise then, that 3D cuts the battery life in about half.

I'm strongly considering buying a launch model.