NVIDIA Launches New SLI Physics Technology 299
Thomas Hines writes "NVIDIA just launched a new SLI Physics technology. It offloads the physics processing from the CPU to the graphics card. According to the benchmark, it improves the frame rate by more than 10x. Certainly worth investing in SLI if it works."
You know what... (Score:2, Interesting)
Nice (Score:5, Interesting)
co-processor (Score:5, Interesting)
General purpose GPUs (Score:5, Interesting)
Press release. (Score:3, Interesting)
1) What limitations are there on calculations. A GPU is not as general as a cpu and it would probably suck when dealing with branches especially when they aren't independant.
2) How much faster could this actually be. Is it simply a matter of looking to the future? (ie: we can already run with Aniso and AA and high resolutions so 5 years from now they'll be "overpowered"). IMO the next logical step is full fledged HDR and then more polygons.
3) What is exactly expected of these. General physics shouldn't be, but i can understand if they do small effects here or there.
"Technology" (Score:3, Interesting)
Besides, I rather think this is what nVidia had in mind when they first started making SLI boards. It was always obvious that the rendering benefit from SLI wasn't going to be cost-effective. Turning their boards into general purpose game accelerators has probably been in their thoughts for a while.
The PURE EVIL contained in modern graphics cards.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:General purpose GPUs (Score:2, Interesting)
Hence the Cell processor.
Re:Nice (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:10x faster? (Score:4, Interesting)
I used brook to compute some SVM calculations, and my 7800GT was about 40x faster than my Athlon64 3000+ (even after I hand-optimized some loops using SSE instructions). So its perfectly understandable for physics to be 10x faster on the GPU.
Someone hasn't seen the spore video (Score:2, Interesting)
Besides, who doesn't like rag dolling? I played through HL2 just so I could toss bodies around with the gravity gun.
Re:You know what... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why use a GPU, use a PPU (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdotted - How wide are the floats? (Score:3, Interesting)
What ever happened to the hype about dedicated physics chips?
The original article appears to be slashdotted.
So could somebody tell me how wide the floats are in this "SLI" engine? [I don't even know what "SLI" stands for.]
AFAIK, nVidia [like IBM/Sony "cell"] uses only 32-bit single-precision floats [and, as bad as that is, ATi uses only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floats].
What math/physics/chemistry/engineering types need is as much precision as possible - preferably 128 bits.
Why? Because the stuff they are modelling tends to be highly non-linear and the calculations tend to be highly unstable.
32-bits isn't even enough to give integer granularity up to 16 million:
Re:You know what... (Score:1, Interesting)
Socialism does not imply monopolies any more than capitalism does (though both can lead to them). Scandanavian countries all have quasi-socialist governments and they are prosperous and competative.
One more point, every American family is communist at heart (shared resources, centralized planning, etc).
Re:This is a bad idea (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Nice (Score:1, Interesting)
"How does this technology differ from 3dfx's SLI? NVIDIA SLI differs in many ways. First, 3dfx SLI was implemented on a shared bus using PCI. The PCI bus delivered ~100MB/sec. of bus throughput, while PCI Express is a point-to-point interface that can deliver ~60x the total bandwidth of PCI. Second, 3dfx SLI performed interleaving of scan lines, and combined in the analog domain, which could result in image quality issues due to DAC differences and other factors. 3dfx Voodoo technology also only performed triangle setup, leaving the geometry workload for the CPU, hence 3dfx SLI only scaled simple texture fill rate, and then used inter-frame scalability. NVIDIA SLI technology is PCI Express based, uses a completely digital frame combining method that has no impact on image quality, can scale geometry performance, and supports a variety of scalability algorithms to best match the scalability method with application demands."
Re:Before people get too excited... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:You know what... (Score:3, Interesting)
Finland is be a democratic country with heavy socialist leanings. It used to have even stronger socialist tendencies, but has suffered from incompetent leadership for the past two decades (ever since Kekkonen came too old and sick to rule, IMHO), and that has lead to a tighter integration with the globalized ultra-capitalist economy, much to the detriment of both economy and citizens.
In any case, democratic countries tend to lean towards socialism, simply because socialism means public healthcare and other safety nets of a welfare state, and who wouldn't want assurances of safety ?
Re:Old School is new again? (Score:2, Interesting)
There has been a constant battle over the last 20 years over who gets to do the processing, the CPU or dedicated chips. Although right now it may seem like multiple special-purpose chips may seem to have decisively won, these things go in cycles. The major, largely forgotten contribution of the Macintosh is to replace the modest CPU plus multiple support chips that were common in computers of that day (C64, Atari 16bit, Lisa, Xerox, Apple IIgs) with a blazingly fast 8 MHz CPU and a bare minimum of support chips. By comparison, the Lisa cost five times as much as the first Mac, and only ran at 5 MHz. Although it seems strange now, at the time, the benefits of a fast CPU were not considered to be all that great. This model gained ascendency with the IBM PC when it became clear that the support chips paradigm had large backwards compatibility problems, for example when the massive sales and huge install base of the C64 failed to carry over to the Amiga.
In IBM land, Intel went on to wage a decades-long battle to have the CPU do everything. At one time, sound cards, network cards and modems were complex beasts that did a lot of processing that the CPU couldn't handle. Rapid advances in CPU speed lead to things like win-modems, simpler sounds cards (without the awesome wavetable and midi stuff), and networks cards that weren't, like an early ATM card I had, more powerful than the CPU. So, for awhile it seemed that the highly CPU-centric model was here to stay.
Right now, it seems the pendulum is swinging the other way, but I wouldn't dare to make a prediction about 10 years from now. The PC business can be screwy...
- Apostate
Re:The PURE EVIL contained in modern graphics card (Score:3, Interesting)