AGEIA Demo's | Real time water ( using PPU )

Meh, it weren't very long was it ;)

Sony's PS3 demos were much more impressive :D
 
Yeh that was quite short but water seems to be pretty good. I like the way it doesn;t act as one body but instead some droplets say on the car
 
Not bad, but its a bit of a waste until it looks a bit better, could be used on better things. I'd not call it waterdroplets neither, more mercury.
 
Untill water looks near-perfect realisim I dont think it will be put to much use, but the "thick water" as I will call it can be used for things like rain, small puddles etc, but stuff like waterfalls made out of this wont look overly wonderfully.

It could also be covered differently and be used for other things, like melted metal.
 
i dont think they want to show us how the water looks, they want to show us how the water react when it reach the car .
 
well its a step in the right direction thats for sure
 
Ritz said:
Untill water looks near-perfect realisim I dont think it will be put to much use, but the "thick water" as I will call it can be used for things like rain, small puddles etc, but stuff like waterfalls made out of this wont look overly wonderfully.

It could also be covered differently and be used for other things, like melted metal.
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waste to use it for rain when shader effects and regular ways of doing falling rain work just fine.

The only real use for this kind of liquid effects is well.. actually I can't think of one. convert the particles to sprites and it could be used for much nicer particle effects (as used in the UE3 engine) same could be said for flamethrower weapons, using animated sprites and particle system, would look rather good.

Though saying that.. it could be used for water splashes, again using sprites and very faint. That would look pretty good. Wouldn't be an fps killer neither that way, PSU or not.

-

DigiQ8 - naa cause its hardly new. Ok its realtime but thats all, particles have been around for a long time in 3D. It was simply to show that many dynamic objects able to interact with each other with no slowdown.
 
Bottle + those water effects + fire = petrol bombs.
 
DigiQ8 said:
i dont think they want to show us how the water looks, they want to show us how the water react when it reach the car .
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It still looks chunky and acts like a heavy, thick liquid rather than water. It's just not very accurate unless they were going for a really thick liquid. Water is harder to simulate than something like mercury because it moves faster, causing more problems. I bet they didn't do water specifically because it is harder to properly simulate. Water would splash when it hit the roof... not just ooze. They have a decent simulation of one aspect of fluids, but it only works when it stays in large chunks. They need to get the size of the particles down a bit for it to look good. You can either perfectly simulate the liquid on a nearly molecular level or you can code the different aspects in for a more performance-friendly solution. I suggest that they add a system that spawns appropriate sprites in situations where some of the water would turn into a mist (ie: wind resistance during long falls, particularly hard impacts, etc)... and they would also need to be able to simulate situations where turbulent water gathers a bunch of tiny bubbles (ie: the white part at the top of larger waves, when someone/something dives into the water, the base of a waterfall, etc).

The PS3 tech demo seems to have perfected the look of the physically simulated water. They had proper reflection, refraction, and even caustics. It acted appropriately for the situation, as well. It was beautiful. It doesn't seem like they accounted for the other behaviors of water that I mentioned either... but it still looked much more impressive than this demo, IMO.
 
ppu.jpg

Back in March, after the Game Developers Conference, we ran an editorial questioning whether or not the PC gaming world is ready for a dedicated physics accelerator chip. In it, we mentioned how badly AGEIA handled the coming-out of their PPU, or Physics Processing Unit. They had no live demos running on hardware, could name no partners, no software titles using the hardware, no price estimates. Now, a few months later at E3, things have changed a lot.

We sat down the company and witnessed two demos running live on first-run, A0 silicon. The final silicon that will ship in boards is A1—AGEIA made a simple metal spin, but made no major changes to the silicon design. It'll be produced on a standard .13 micron CMOS process at TSMC. Who's going to build boards with this thing? So far, ASUS is the first to announce a partnership with AGEIA. They'll have a PPU board with AGEIA's chip on the market in the fourth quarter of this year, with 128MB of GDDR3 memory, for roughly $249 to $299. Initially, it will only come only in a PCI card, with PCIe cards expected further in the future.

The first demo was graphically simple, but still fairly impressive. A large rocky hillside had about 4,200 boulders dropped at the top, which all bounced, tumbled, and interacted in a realistic (and speedy) fashion. AGEIA claimed that a dual-core CPU can handle maybe 800-1,000 in a demo like this, but was quick to note that 4,200 boulders was nowhere near the capability of their chip. There's a driver issue right now where a lot of the timings need to be worked out between the massively parallel math units in the chip. Within a couple of months, the company will have a new driver which will enable them to raise the boulder count to 32,000. They're confident they can reach that number, but even if they can only get halfway there, 16,000 to 20,000 boulders is a lot better than a CPU can do.

The other demo was somewhat less impressive, showing particle-based fluid dynamics by displaying a shiny car that had fluid streams "sprayed" on it, like a primitive car wash. The particles could be change to plasma, soap bubbles, water, or whatever, but it honestly didn't look that great. Chalk it up to having programmers make demos, and not having real artists involved. The demo involved 6,000 particles, but again, that's the driver timing issue rearing its ugly head. The fixed driver in a couple months should be able to handle 40-50,000 particles.

At launch, the PPU cards will only handle rigid-body and particle-based fluid dynamics physics calculations. A driver update early in 2006 will enable both soft-body and hair/clothing acceleration as well. The cards will come with a tech demo made in the Unreal Engine 3, created by the team that made Crimson Skies for the Xbox, where the player can run around a hanger crowded with boxes, crates, barrels, and a plane, and absolutely destroy everything. We saw a video of the demo, and it looks neat, but the highlight came when the plane crashed into the hangar and realistically destroyed stacks of crates and boxes in an explosion of interactivity we simply don't see in games.

AGEIA was able to name some software titles that will enjoy physics acceleration, too. Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends from Microsoft, Ghost Recon 3 from UbiSoft, City of Villians from NC Soft, and Atari's Matrix license Path of Neo are some of the highlights they told us about.

We still haven't seen what actual game titles look like when accelerated by the AGEIA PPU—those demos will come later this summer, as the game content and PPU drivers get a little further along. Still, this initial push into hardware accelerated physics seems like a much more solid offering than it did at GDC two months ago. We look forward to seeing it in action, in a real top-tier game, to see if it delivers the gaming revolution AGEIA promises.
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So it looks like that this looks like crap, because of the driver issue, with it not being able to handle all the particle for it to look like liquid. They tried to get the same effect with fewer particles, but it didn't look good :p

Can't wait for these bad boys at the end of this year. Santa be good to me :p lol
 
half the price of a high end video card isn't too bad.. time to recycle those damn beer cans!
 
I cant see how it can become part of the PC setup unless it was built on the graphics chip.
 
What do you mean azz0r? You don't see how this thing can become necessary or something?

Well back in the day before 3D Accelerators, and the first one was introduced, they may have thought the same way, because people thought "the CPU's can do the graphics! We don't need these fancy 3D Accelerators"

Only time will tell if the PPU is just as good for gaming as the GPU was... Very soon we should find out :D
 
azz0r said:
I cant see how it can become part of the PC setup unless it was built on the graphics chip.
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ummm..its what is known as a PCI Slot on your motherboard..thats how it will become part of a PC setup..

I'm kidding..I know you didn't mean it that way!:D

I started PC gaming right when video cards were the new thing,and remember hearing people say exactly what Iced_Eagle said...
 
whats the price for 1 of these, the article says $249-300. or is that for a new mobo with 1 of these? *confused*
 
Iced_Eagle said:
What do you mean azz0r? You don't see how this thing can become necessary or something?

Well back in the day before 3D Accelerators, and the first one was introduced, they may have thought the same way, because people thought "the CPU's can do the graphics! We don't need these fancy 3D Accelerators"
Click to expand...

lol! I remember saying that :p I couldn't see why anyone would want something that made all the textures blurry (since in the beginning thats really all they did) and quake looked ugly, course i only got to see these new fancy cards doing their thing in the magazines.
 
Computer5k said:
Here's some real0time fluid for yall :), open-source too :D
http://www.ss.iij4u.or.jp/~amada/fluid/
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woah thats so cool, the water effect isnt half bad either.

All i can do it press space bar and let the water fall and then press space again to freeze it. Is there anything else i;m missing?

EDIT: ah got it. You can drag the water around with right click and then pause with space.
 
OCybrManO said:
It looks like really chunky mercury...
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I was going to say KY Jelly :p I mean its not like it has no use, you could use it for infinitly flowing water i.e. Water Falls
 
DEATH eVADER said:
I was going to say KY Jelly :p I mean its not like it has no use, you could use it for infinitly flowing water i.e. Water Falls
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would you want to though.. its not gonna look as realistic as a few polygons with animated waterlike textures on and a few mist type particles at the bottom look.
 
Neutrino said:
Here's the ps3 demo for comparison. Looked much better I thought.

http://media.ps3.ign.com/articles/615/615000/vids_1.html
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Impressive, at first I thought this water surface was a simple subdivided plane which was affected by physics, such demo's have been around since the GF2 era. But when he scooped some water out of the tub with the glass, that was indeed very nice. I still think the above is correct, and it's coded in that the glasses create water particles when held under the water surface. I really doubt the water is entirely particles rather than just lots of polygons.
 
It does'nt look like water and it does'nt react like water would if it was to fall from that height onto an almost flat surface. It seems to just hit the car and roll right of it straight away...if that was realistic, the water would of splashed when it hit the roof.
 
Looks freaking awesome. Especially considering the Ageia hardware will be taking care of most of it.

Who the frot cares if it's not transparent and mapped with a ripply shader - it's a proof of concept, and it's working well. I can't wait until gfx cards have dedicated hardware for this kind of stuff.
 
Ut 2007 will use ppu.

and that vid is a step in the right direction for sure.
 
Iced_Eagle said:
What do you mean azz0r? You don't see how this thing can become necessary or something?

Well back in the day before 3D Accelerators, and the first one was introduced, they may have thought the same way, because people thought "the CPU's can do the graphics! We don't need these fancy 3D Accelerators"

Only time will tell if the PPU is just as good for gaming as the GPU was... Very soon we should find out :D
Click to expand...

Now heres a guy who knows what he's talking about. I was thinking the same way, but you put it so delicately

Back to the Bink Video, the water might be more realistic if the property for the liquid was altered for friction and surface tension
 
all of ps3's demos were ****ing cg, like killzone 2 that was obviously cg, it prob had like 6 trillion polys in it.
 
mikeandike22 said:
all of ps3's demos were ****ing cg, like killzone 2 that was obviously cg, it prob had like 6 trillion polys in it.
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eh? wrong thread maybe? :rolling:
 
mikeandike22 said:
all of ps3's demos were ****ing cg, like killzone 2 that was obviously cg, it prob had like 6 trillion polys in it.
Click to expand...

The tech demos weren't cg.
 
To be fair, even the PS3 demo wasn't that impressive. Once PPUs hit PCs we'll be able to do shit like that no problem. The realtime damage to the ship's sails was sweet tho' :D
 
DEATH eVADER said:
Now heres a guy who knows what he's talking about. I was thinking the same way, but you put it so delicately

Back to the Bink Video, the water might be more realistic if the property for the liquid was altered for friction and surface tension
Click to expand...



I agree, hehe, I remember the big deal of when the first 3DFX card came out...


Anyone remember games like "pod" :p
 
That looked gorgeous. Can you imagine water rushing down a hill and sweeping away Combine APCs and Guards?
 
Oh my god. The Physics Processing Unit never ceases to amaze me.

Soft body deformation and tearing is what is used on those sails. Also could be used on metal, as seen in the demo for Motor Storm.

The water physics are amazing. When he had those cups I was like "No..." And then he scoops up the water... I am just speechless.

Can't wait 'til we can buy them for our PC's.

A new PC component is born :)
 
jondyfun said:
To be fair, even the PS3 demo wasn't that impressive. Once PPUs hit PCs we'll be able to do shit like that no problem. The realtime damage to the ship's sails was sweet tho' :D
Click to expand...

Not to mention Upgrading every year, as well as the possible SLI connection later on in production
 
I just dont see why physics need a whole card to themself, use the freaking processor.
 
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