Report: NVIDIA-Nintendo deal is dead

The widely-rumoured deal between graphics card-maker NVIDIA and Nintendo, which was thought to have seen technology from the former company make its way into the forthcoming 3DS handheld, is no longer going ahead.

That's according to a report in videogames tech blog Digital Foundry, which claims that Nintendo has opted for a Japanese partner instead - and that the new platform is "almost certain to be revealed at E3" next week.

"According to our two independent, unconnected sources, the Nintendo 3DS features a design totally divorced from the NVIDIA Tegra SoC (system on chip) initially thought to have been powering the DS successor," it reports. "It's now thought that Nintendo has instead chosen a Japanese partner for the 3D acceleration hardware within the 3DS.

"Sources also confirmed that the 3DS' development codename is 'Nintendo CTR', meaning that this motherboard picture we ran a couple of weeks back, sourced from the FCC website, is indeed something akin to a development or test station for the new handheld.

"This strongly suggests that 3DS does feature a widescreen "glasses free" stereoscopic 3D display, along with a more conventional 4:3 2D display beneath it. Interestingly, it appears that the images of the board published on the FCC website were uploaded in error: they were supposed to have been made public 10 months after the submission in April this year, presumably after the 3DS itself ships."

E3 action itself kicks off next week, with the Nintendo press conference set to take place at 5pm BST on June 15.