Ppu

[Steven]

Let us discuss the up coming Physics Processing Units. The only PPU that has been developed (not realised) so far is the AGEIA PhysX which was previewed at this years E3. This PPU can display thousands of physics elements on a monitor at once. Hopefully this means that in game characters will finally have entire clothing that moves around like in real life. The AGEIA PhysX card works by simply taking away Physics processing from the GPU and CPU.
Game Developers already have the SDK for this piece of hardware and games are being developed around it.

 

[Naudian]

Yes! Lets discuss!

Uh...

Hmm..

Well...it better kick ass, and I hope the cards aren't over $200, else I ain't getting one.

 

[Asus]

I dont think they will be getting to clothing just yet. =p
More detailed explosions/smoke and not having it bog down your CPU is what you will get when this comes out probably. But I'm sure we are getting close to the moving clothing.

 

[Fender357]

I actualy e-mailed someone at Valve asking them what they thought about this.

The reply was,


Thanks for your email and interest in Valve's games.

We are very interested in tracking the development work occurring in
this space. Right now, that's about the only comment we have on this
subject. Perhaps we'll have further comment at a later date.

Cheers


So it seems that right now they don't want to comment on it very much. I could understand that seeing as they are already using the Havok engine, and software physics processing like them are totaly against something like a PPU. They say it isn't neccisary .

But if you look on AGEIA.com, you can see some big names already on board with their PPU.

Epic

Ubi Soft

Cryptic Studios

Spark

Ritual Entertainment

Unreal

Big Huge Games


I'm sure the Unreal 3 engine will take advantage of it in some awesome ways.

 

[Cole]

I could understand that seeing as they are already using the Havok engine, and software physics processing like them are totaly against something like a PPU. They say it isn't neccisary

Ageia has already gone and said they would be happy to license out there physic cards to Havok so they could offer there own API support.

 

[Zeus]

Great! *homer* woohoo! */homer* Another piece of hardware that we have to pay high amounts of money to keep up with if we want to continue playing games.

 

[Dirk Pitt]

PPU's are dead in the water. As we move forward with dual and quad core processing, the CPU will be able to handle physics threads in one core while it will be business as usual in core #1.

 

[Ren.182]

A dual core CPU wouldn't be able to process 40,000 objects...
And with the PPU's, you won't have to get an upgrade every year. I very much doubt any game would use 40,000 objects per map anytime soon...

 

[Dirk Pitt]

If you have a 3.6 P4 doing nothing but pumping out physics, it will blow the doors off that little add-in 120nm risc processor they want to charge $1k for.

 

[Ren.182]

They wont charge anywhere near that much. It probably wont be that expensive, maybe around the £100 mark.
I'd rather have my CPU sorting through other requests than physics.

 

[Dirk Pitt]

$250 to $300 for the basic PhysiX card. Hey, it's a great idea. If this was a few years ago, this little thing would be a smash hit right now. Things have moved along, and alot of folks that are into gaming are going to have a dual core CPU next upgrade cycle.

So, do you want to spend $300 on a little add-in card or have your nice new DC or QC CPU that you just bought perform the same function?

 

[Steven]

So, do you want to spend $300 on a little add-in card or have your nice new DC or QC CPU that you just bought perform the same function?

Yes, but not everyone can afford a new CPU becasue that means a new motherboard and lots of other crap.

 

[Ren.182]

Games a few years ago wouldn't have needed a physics card. We've really only just began to use physics in games properly over the last year.

These cards will become big eventually and developers will assume that the majority of gamers will have physics cards. Just like they did with graphics cards.

 

[Fender357]

Ageia has already gone and said they would be happy to license out there physic cards to Havok so they could offer there own API support.

I'm very glad to hear that.

As for everything else....

It will be only around 250 - 300 $ for the cards, It was in my Popular Science 2 issues ago.

And no matter what, this will help future games. It dosn't matter how much processer power you've got going, future games are going to suck up more and more of that power all over, and if you've got a dedicated PPU, there will be 0 resources need from the CPU, and 0 is better than any. Especialy with regards to something like physics. If you look at HL2, the physics were awesome, but not perfect ( not like we'll every really get "perfect").
You got that weird lag between objects interacting with each other, and god forbid you try playing a DM map with a lot of physics objects (I know though that, that is more of a Server/Client Side issue, but new approches to multiplayer physics could be developed around a PPU)
Anyway...
If you look at right now, the kind of stuff our PC's are going to have to chug out with Unreal 3, we're all gonna need some upgrading. By the size of these games alone, our processors are gonna take huge hits in performance. DC or whatever. I know this is a setback to all the nerdie high schoolish aged kids without jobs to pay for some 300 buck peice of hardware. But hey.... I've got a job, and I kinda don't care that I'll have to pay that just as long as its something that is going to make our games that much cooler of an experiance.


Morning rant completed. :thumbs: