PhysX Dedicated Physics Processor Explored 142
Ned_Network writes "Yahoo! News & Reuters has a story about a start-up who have created a dedicated physics processor for gamers' PCs. The processor undertakes physics calculations for the CPU and is said to make gaming more realistic - examples such as falling rocks, exploding debris and the way that opponents collapse when you shoot them are cited as advantages of the chip. Only 6 current titles take advantage of the chip but the FAQ claims that another 100 are in production."
is 4.5% APR supported by Ageia? (Score:3, Interesting)
But in the same article, they mention that the extra particles the processor generates swamps the DUAL gpu setup he's got in a demo system. How many of you want to wager the demo system is a hoss in it's own right?
Apparently this card isn't going to help those of us holding out with our Athlon XP AGP systems that perform fine on current gen games, if a current bleeding edge rig can't cut it.
SO now I have to plan for a quad AM2 CPU, quad dual-sli chip GPU w/ 32 Gigs of memory? Damnit all to hell...
*/me researches mortgage rates to subsidize next box-build*
Re:Physics Good, Fire Bad (Score:3, Interesting)
1) Is it going to come down in price? Considering that "mid-range" GPUs are going for around $300, this card at $300 (okay, $299) represents a doubling of the cost to bring a gaming system "up to speed." Right now, with only one option, it's a one-time thing but we all know that if it's successful there will be upgrades.
2) Is this really going to make a huge difference in a world where dual-core CPUs are becoming mainstream, and more cores are coming in the future? Is the performance advantage of their specially designed physics processor so important that, say, an eight-core CPU in 2008 couldn't perform similarly (given enough memory for the software engine), making the existing PhysX cards obsolete?
Considering that one of the titles they tout - Ghost Recon for the Xbox 360 - already implements their technology in software (and they brag about how great it is there), I just don't think that this add-in card has any staying power.
Re:Basically A Poor Man's Cell Type Co-Processor (Score:1, Interesting)
Funny you should say that, one of my friends who is a very senior engineer at NVidia has been talking about the same thing for the past year or so. He has been saying how NVidia views the x86 chips that drive pc gaming systems as a worthless relic that they would like to make irrelevant and have pc game developers to essentially start writing their entire game engines on their GPU.
He seems to be just gushing with excitement over what they are doing in partnership with Sony - it sounds like the PS3 is just the beginning.
No wonder Microsoft went through all the trouble to switch to the more powerful PPC chips and ditched x86.
Scientific Research (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Chess isn't governed by physics (Score:1, Interesting)
This type of CPU would be vastly superior to a standard cpu for calculating possible moves.
Though, while it helps with chess move logic, it wouldn't help with Go logic.
Go logic is still vastly inferior and more difficult. Why I brought up go, I have no idea.
Re:Chess isn't governed by physics (Score:4, Interesting)
You are probably thinking of it since Go is pseudo-famous (among engineers who have attempting thusly and in Japan) as a game that cannot be easily made into a computer simulation properly. While chess has 16 opening moves, Go has...well 12 decent ones, but statistically 361. Finding the variations in a game of Go would just...be impossible currently. It is commonly said that no game has ever been played twice. This may be true: On a 19×19 board, there are about 3361×0.012 = 2.1×10^170 possible positions, most of which are the end result of about (120!)^2 = 4.5×10^397 different (no-capture) games, for a total of about 9.3×10^567 games. Allowing captures gives as many as 10^7.49x10^48
There's more go games then theorized protons in the visable universe!
Re:And here's the real sticking point (Score:3, Interesting)
There are several things wrong with the Ageia business model:
1) they mandate that you use THEIR physics engine in order to access the physics hardware - there is no low-level hardware API that any engine can access - so by supporting their hardware, you are excluding using well-known and stable physics engines such as Havok, ODE (for the open-source crowd) etc for your games. This is a major issue from a development standpoint.
2) the cost issue (which others have brought up). The added cost vs the benefit of actually having these chips installed is simply too much for hardware vendors to actually see this as being a worthwhile thing to add to machines. Currently Ageia is relying on the hardcore gamer crowd seeing this as something that MUST be supported by games, which is a bad way to go about things. Until they sign on a vendor like Dell or HP to actually build machines with these chips, then it's a no-go for developers.
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Re: 1) I've heard that Havok & Nvidia are partnering together to create a bundled video card with an extra dedicated CPU for physics in a single card - so instead of having the single GPU, you will be able to have a GPU, PPU all on a single card in your machine. This will bring the cost down significantly and actually be worth supporting (both for the hardware vendors looking to build machines for the lowest cost) as well as developers - Nvidia's marketing muscle and existing OEM chain will guarantee that vendors will actually build machines using their cards.
As well, from their experience in the video world, i'm guessing that Nvidia's version will provide a low-level API for accessing the hardware, which any physics vendor can then support, instead of forcing developers to use THEIR physics engine (whether it's havok or otherwise).
Until this happens, the concept of a dedicated processor for physics is inevitably going to go the way of 3dfx. Perhaps Ageia will be bought by ATI looking to create their own dedicated GPU / PPU combination, but otherwise I don't see it catching on.
With dedicated 3d graphics, at least there are OTHER applications / reasons that a general mass-market consumer might want such a card - ie the aero-style 3dish interfaces, etc. With a physics processor, unless you are playing games that require it, it's an unnecessary add-on.
I'm curious about scientific applications.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Great for single player, bad for multiplayer? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Is that what I think it is. (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, Deep Blue was "Fast and Dumb" - it could indeed search fast and thus foresee many moves ahead ("into the future"), but it didn't have a good sense of which moves are worth checking out. If there are 10 moves available in the position, DB would generally check all of them out. Which meant that:
It's pretty evident that fast searching has reached its limits. The branching factor makes "more muscle" (as per the famous "brute force" method) pretty useless. The current top programs are the "smart searchers": Hiarcs especially (the epitome of a very wise, very "slow" program), and also Shredder [telia.com]. In fact, even the formerly "fast and dumb" programs need to be smarter than they used to be to remain competitive at the top of the computer chess league. But, as mentioned above, none of them ever was as dumb as the fastest, dumbest program ever: Deep Blue.
weird explosions (Score:3, Interesting)