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Comparing The Nintendo DS And Sony PSP

The two giants in the portable gaming systems market are Nintendo and Sony.  Sony has only recently begun to compete with Nintendo with their line of Playstations, while Nintendo has dominated the home video game console market for over 20 years.

Both Nintendo and Sony are now competing in the portable gaming devices with two innovative products-the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP (Playstation Portable).  What are the major differences between products?  The Sony PSP is more expensive being priced at $199.00 for just the console and $250.00 for a more traditional value pack.  The Nintendo DS is priced at $129.99, a significant difference in price.  However, the Sony PSP is considered by in large to be the superior system.  Consider the hardware specifics of both portable gaming consoles.

Nintendo DS Games System

The Nintendo DS has two different LCD screens, 3 inches in length and each with a resolution of 256 x 192 pixels.  Dimensions are 62 x 46 mm and 77 diagonal mm, with a dot pitch of 0.24 mm.  The system opens similarly to a traditional portable gaming laptop computer, with a screen on each piece.  The lowermost display has a resistive touch screen allowing users to simply touch the screen for some control functions.  This portable gaming device uses two different ARM processors at speeds of 67 mhz and 33 mhz with 4 mb of primary memory.  The system has adequate 3D hardware, however, lacks texture filtering, which causes some graphics to look slightly "blocky."  The system can render 120,000 triangles per second at 30 fps, however, it has a limit on the number of triangles it can render for a single scene.  The limit is approximately 4000 triangles.  The hardware is designed to render one screen at a time, so rendering 3D to both screens is difficult.  Memory cards can support up to 1 gigabit, or 128 mbs.

The Sony PSP Portable Gaming Computer

The Sony Games PSP System features an LCD screen with a 16:9 ratio and a 480 x 272 pixel resolution capable of displaying 16.77 million colors.  The main microprocessor was originally designed to run as fast 333 mhz but recently capped at 222 mhz possibly for better battery economy.  The Sony PSP has 32 MiB main RAM and 3 MiB DRAM.  There is also a 166 mhz graphics chip with 2 MiB embedded memory and 512 bit interface allowing for amazing 3D graphics.  The PSP is capable of rendering 33 million polygons per second. 

It is generally believed that the Sony PSP is the superior system, not only due to its more powerful hardware, but also for its multimedia features, including the ability to play music and video, as well as browse the Internet and connect to a USB port on a home PC for data transfer.  However, due to aggressive marketing, Nintendo continues to dominate the market, outselling the PSP by some four million units.