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UPDATED : Some more Nintendo 3DS GPU Information

The PICA200 scales with up to four pipelines and processes from up to four programmable vertex units. The 3D core, using their proprietary graphics technology named MAESTRO-2G, the second generation of the Maestro design, implements custom graphics algorithms as hardware for enabling a set of shading features that include per-vertex sub-surface scattering, bidirectional reflectance distribution function, cook-torrance, polygon subdivision, and soft shadowing.

Their image post-processing module, the PICA-FBM frame buffer management, can polish the image with anti-aliasing and a set of other 2D functions and can actually be licensed independently as a core for 2D-only devices. In either case, the PICA-FBM can be extended with a PICA-VG vector graphics module.

The DMP company is another small graphics firm, staffed by 29, which started as a university research project and turned into a business a few years ago through funding initiatives. Shinichi Okamoto, former Sony executive who headed up development of the PlayStation2, sits on the board of directors.

Futuremark highlighted the capabilities of the PICA200 with a custom OpenGL ES demo entitled Mikage, with familiar visual themes from other of their benchmarking and custom demos for portables. Technology demonstrations from DMP’s first-generation-MAESTRO, proof-of-concept processor, the ULTRAY2000, are also provided.

From B3D Forum.

It’s sounding a lot like it is somewhere in-between the original iPhone GPU, and the current iPhone GPU.

If Nintendo have gone with OpenGL ES, then they are smarter than Microsoft, who remain the only mobile device vendor in the entire marketplace not using OpenGL ES.

UPDATE : I was spot on with my comment above about the PICA200 falling somewhere in-between the original iPhone GPU and the current iPhone GPU. People at E3 were obviously wowed by the 3D and some of the special extensions the chip has.

PICA200 has support only for the older OpenGL ES 1.1 standard, but DMP has supplemented its capabilities with bespoke hardware extensions that allow it to handle effects such as “gaseous object rendering”, soft shadows, per-pixel lighting, procedural textures and refraction mapping.

These custom extensions help mitigate the absence of the programmable pixel shaders had Nintendo opted for a graphics core with the full OpenGL ES 2.0 feature set.

From GoNintendo.

PDF Info Sheet for the PICA200 from 2008.