Sony have released some detailed specs on the internals for the upcoming PSP. The resulting device will probably be able to run games of a similar level of detail to the current PS2, which to put it mildly, totally rawks! Finally, handheld console gaming will move beyond the realm of side-scrollers and crappy semi-3D racing games.

ExtremeTech reveals some of the steamy details:

The PSP’s graphics engine will feature a 512-bit interface, Okabe said, pushing 664 million pixels or 35 million polygons per second. Freed from the need to conform to any other graphics API besides its own, Sony decided to support some basic graphics primitives as well as directional lighting, clipping, environment projection and texture mapping, fogging, alpha blending, depth and stencil tests, and dithering, all using either 16- or 32-bit color. The 166-MHz graphics core will include 2-Mbytes of embedded graphics memory.

Sony apparently will support a graphics model based on surfaces, rather than polygons. Okabe displayed an illustration of a cartoon character that looked more realistic than a polygon-based model, which he said contained the same amount of data. The graphics block will also be capable of vertex blending, a morphing technology that can interpolate changes made between objects.

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