PICA200

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PICA200 is a

IP Core which can be licensed to other companies to incorporate into their SOCs.[1] It was most notably licensed for use in the Nintendo 3DS
.

It was announced at SIGGRAPH 2005, and an operational demo, "Mikage", was presented in collaboration with Futuremark at SIGGRAPH 2006.[2]

Overview

The PICA200 is the successor to the ULTRAY2000, a proof of concept graphics workstation presented at SIGGRAPH 2005, created with the goal of testing DMP's attempts at a low power fixed-function "MAESTRO" GPU architecture.[3]

The PICA200 implements the "MAESTRO-2G" architecture and supports programmable vertex shaders and geometry shaders, with a fixed-function fragment stage. It is advertised as supporting OpenGL ES 1.1 with certain proprietary extensions.[4]

The PICA200 has up to 4 programmable vertex processors which can work in parallel. One of those processors, the "primitive engine", can be used as either vertex processor or a geometry processor.[5]

Some MAESTRO-2G extensions include, per-pixel lighting[6] (where the lighting is calculated per pixel instead of per vertex), procedural texture generation,[7] bidirectional reflectance distribution function (BRDF),[6] Cook-Torrance specular highlights,[6] polygon subdivision (through geometry shaders),[8] soft shadow projection, and fake subsurface scattering[9] (similar to two-sided lighting).[10]

Applications

The PICA200 is used as the GPU for the Nintendo 3DS portable handheld game console.[11]

Specification

  • Manufacturing process:
    65 nm[8]
  • Maximum clock frequency 400 MHz
  • Pixel performance (theoretical):
  • Vertex performance (theoretical):
    • 40Mtriangle/s @100 MHz[8]
    • 15.3Mpolygon/s @200 MHz[12]
  • Power consumption: 0.5-1.0 mW/MHz[8]
  • Frame Buffer max. 4095×4095 pixels
  • Supported pixel formats: RGBA4444, RGB565, RGBA5551, RGBA8888
  • Vertex program (ARB_vertex_program)
  • Render to Texture
  • Hardware Transform and Lighting(T&L)
  • MipMap
  • Bilinear texture filtering
  • Alpha blending
  • Full-scene anti-aliasing (2×2)
  • Phong Shading
  • Cel Shading
  • Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping
  • Dot3 Bump Mapping/Normal Mapping.
  • Shadow Mapping
  • Shadow Volumes
  • Self-Shadowing
  • Lightmapping
  • Environment Mapping/Reflection Mapping
  • Volumetric Fog[13]
  • Post-processing effects like motion, bloom, depth of field, HDR rendering, gamma correction
  • Polygon offset
  • Depth Test, Stencil Test, Alpha Test.
  • Clipping, Culling
  • 8-bit stencil buffer
  • 24-bit depth buffer
  • Single/Double/Triple buffer
  • 5-Stage TEV Pipeline
  • TEV Combiner Buffer(Only the first four TEV stages can write to the combiner buffer)
  • Color Combiners, Alpha Combiners, Texture Combiners.
  • DMP's MAESTRO-2G technology:
    • per-pixel lighting
    • fake sub-surface scattering
    • procedural texture
    • refraction mapping
    • subdivision primitive
    • shadow
    • gaseous object rendering
    • bidirectional reflectance distribution function
    • Cook-Torrance Model
    • polygon subdivision
    • soft shadowing

References

  1. ^ "Digital Media Professionals Inc at Computex 2012". YouTube. Jun 7, 2012. Archived from the original on 2021-12-21. Retrieved Jun 4, 2021.
  2. ^ "DMP Shows Capabilities of the PICA Platform with Demo from Futuremark". July 25, 2006. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
  3. ^ "Zenji Nishikawa's "PICA200" course for 3D game fans by Zenji Nishikawa (Part 1)". July 15, 2010. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
  4. ^ "Procedural texture generation unit and saving video memory". August 15, 2006. Archived from the original on August 26, 2010. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
  5. ^ "Primitive processing and advanced shading architecture for embedded space - HPG 2011" (PDF). August 6, 2011. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
  6. ^ a b c "Zenji Nishikawa's "PICA200" course for 3D game fans (Part 2)". July 16, 2010. Retrieved June 4, 2021.
  7. ^ "Procedural texture generation unit and saving video memory". August 15, 2006. Archived from the original on August 26, 2010. Retrieved August 26, 2010.
  8. ^ a b c d e "[Page64] DMP Inc. PICA graphics core" (PDF). EuroGraphics 2008, Crete. April 14–18, 2008.
  9. ^ "K. Kolchin, CURVATURE BASED RENDERING METHOD AND DEVICE FOR TRANSLUCENT MATERIALS SUCH AS SKIN OF HUMAN BODY, JP2008250577 (A)". October 16, 2008.
  10. ^ "Simon Green, GPU Gems 2, Chapter 16. Real-Time Approximations to Subsurface Scattering". August 15, 2006.
  11. ^ "Press Release: DMP 3D Graphics IP core "PICA200" is adopted by Nintendo 3DS". Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP). June 21, 2010. Archived from the original on September 20, 2010. [html] "Press Release: DMP 3D Graphics IP core "PICA200" is adopted by Nintendo 3DS". Archived from the original on 2010-08-25. Retrieved 2010-08-26. [pdf]
  12. ^ a b "PICA 200 3D Graphics IP (product brochure)" (PDF). Digital Media Professionals Inc. (DMP). June 11, 2010. Archived from the original (PDF) on July 4, 2010.
  13. ^ "The Nintendo 3DS Knows How to Make Fog, It's Built on a Chip - Siliconera". Archived from the original on 2017-10-16. Retrieved 2016-01-29.

External links