Physics Processors Question

Azza

Physics Processors...I have read that they are on the verge of been released. Many games (around the 100 mark) support or will support them. Just wondering how much of performance benefit this will however...what sort of performances gains we looking at here?

Is this eventually going be an important compontet of PC's or is its use limited to games?

gline

u got any link to info on these, i havent seen anything yet

Richard Dower

LOL...read loads about these this morning:

http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/1-vt57997.html?postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0

Alienware and DELL have cards, they are $249.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1817922,00.asp

http://www.ageia.com/

http://www.ageia.com/physxinaction/demos.html

Richard Dower

Havoc have there new FX engine as well, not sure if that's hardware or software based.

Richard Dower

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Details.aspx?NewsId=16605

Cuddlesworth

The havoc engine runs off of graphics chips and creates the illusion of physics rather than real collision detection. As for the Ppu, at the moment its still a pipe-dream. Wait for them to come out and see do they do anything. I know unreal 3 is going to support, but at what level and for what purpose remains to be seen.

po0k

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060322-6436.html

conzy

The Ageia Physx PPU is available to DELL, Alienware, Voodoo PC....... as we speak, and will be launched in May to consumers:)

It will revolutionise gaming in the future, but 64bit CPUs have been out for years and Dual core has been out a long time, and 99% of applications still dont support either fully.

The PS3 has a Ageia PPU,

And there are some nice demos on the Ageia site, and you can download the SDK, it has some nice demos, that run well if you have a half decent CPU;)

I cant wait for destructable envoirements and blood splatter:D

RazielDoomgate

all im going to say is arghh.. im ment to be buying the best of the best of the best this summer in terms of whole new pc and i already bugeted for the nforce5 mobos, 7900s etc aslong as there released on time... and your telling me theres more to buy!! note i know you dont have to have it but it would be cool if ya did

TomCo

Personally, I’m worried about DX10 and Vista. I've heard a lot of rumours and I’m reconsidering my build in May. Is it true that DX10 has no legacy support and will only work with vista? Will I be able to play my old Dx9 and below games?

Worst of all will my expensive new DX9 graphics card be useless when DX10 comes out leaving me €400 out of pocket and having to but a new card?

All these new developments are pissing me off, I've been dreaming about a new Pc for a year now and I feel its being snatched away from me.

gizmo

The Havok/nVidia solution is different in that it will use one graphics card in a SLi setup for the physics work. The Aegia solution is of course a seperate card.

NVIDIA and Havok Demonstrate World's First GPU-Powered Game Physics Solution at Game Developer's Conference
AGEIA PhysX Launch - GDC Event Coverage
Lotsa Other Links

stevenmu

TomCo wrote:

Personally, I’m worried about DX10 and Vista. I've heard a lot of rumours and I’m reconsidering my build in May. Is it true that DX10 has no legacy support and will only work with vista? Will I be able to play my old Dx9 and below games?

Worst of all will my expensive new DX9 graphics card be useless when DX10 comes out leaving me €400 out of pocket and having to but a new card?

All these new developments are pissing me off, I've been dreaming about a new Pc for a year now and I feel its being snatched away from me.

There'll be a version of DX9 with Vista that sits alongside DX10 and lets you play legacy games. As far as I can tell, unless a card is DX10 certified then it won't play DX10 games. I'd guess that for the immediate future DX10 games will ship with DX9 legacy modes that'll disable some DX10 only features.

Faceless Man wrote:

The Havok/nVidia solution is different in that it will use one graphics card in a SLi setup for the physics work. The Aegia solution is of course a seperate card.

The nVidia solution will also work in a single card setup, it'll naturally have a performance hit though.

conzymaher wrote:

The PS3 has a Ageia PPU

It actually just uses, or can use, the Ageia software, which'll then run on the cell chip.

Azza wrote:

Is this eventually going be an important compontet of PC's or is its use limited to games?

At the moment it's only being targetted at games but the type of chip (vector processor) used in PPUs (and GPUs) is usefull for many other things. They would be much more efficient than general purpose CPUs for things like Audio/Video encoding for example, or pretty much anything where the same sets of instructions need to be applied to large sets of data. SSE instructions on todays general purpose CPUs are basically an attempt to incorporate vector processor functionality onto general purpose CPUs, so anything that is enhanced by them would benefit greatly from a real vector processor.

I'd imagine that over the next year or two, standards will begin to emerge (DirectPhysX ? OpenPL ?) that'll abstract away from the current implementations, no ones going to want to write stuff that'll only run on either an AGEIA solution or an nVidia one, and no one will want to write stuff twice to work on both. Once that's done I think we'll start to see more general applications that'll take advantage of either an onboard PPU if present or spare GPU cycles if not.

gline

the havok/nvidia offering seems interesting as no new hardware would need to be purchased if you own an sli setup.

I wonder how badly hit the graphics would be with it? I suppose the game would just run with one gfx active and the 2nd gfx acting as the ppu??? yeh?

stevenmu

gline wrote:

the havok/nvidia offering seems interesting as no new hardware would need to be purchased if you own an sli setup.

I wonder how badly hit the graphics would be with it? I suppose the game would just run with one gfx active and the 2nd gfx acting as the ppu??? yeh?

That seems to be the general opinion going around alright, I don't think it's been revealed yet exactly how it's going to work out. One problem could be that in a standard sli setup, all the data must be mirrored in the memory on both cards. If this still holds true with one card acting as a PPU and all graphics and physics data has to be on both cards then there's still going to be a performance hit when compared to a single gpu with a dedicated PPU solution. Of course they may be able to rework the sli drivers to avoid this, only mirroring data on both cards when both are performing graphics work.

Ultimately it'll really be about game support, there's a lot of games lined up for AGEIA, I haven't heard of any yet for Havok/nVidia.

gline

hmmm... im very interested to see how this works out, as physics engines are becoming so important in games now, that it would be great to route that through a different processor and free up the cpu

Scruff

i hope there will be some software workaround so that if you have a 2+ core cpu that the pyshics processing can be done on the 2nd core to some level seeing as it'll be a while before games will be able to make use of multicore architecture.

TomCo, i'd be worried about more than just a new graphics card as you might need more RAM as well as some initial reports are saying that you'll need 2gb+ or ram to play games on vista.

/edit
and its passively cooled! thats another nice plus.

conzy

Does this mean some games will use use AGEIA physics and some games will use Nvidia/Havok Physics? That would be crap, if you just bought a AGEIA Phsyx card and you still cannot run a game that uses the competitors physx.

The Xbox 360 has a better GPU than the PS3, but The PS3 can run Ageia Phsyx on one of its DSP cores, So it may actually be better than the Xbox360 if it ever launches:rolleyes:

Did anyone see the DX10 Farcry Demo??? WOW:eek:

conzy

Look at this

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=226&type=expert&pid=1

ATI's Offering is up to 7 times faster than Nvidia's

conzy

Here is a link too the Farcry Demo:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8868524280667034762&q=crytek

Scruff

conzymaher wrote:

Did anyone see the DX10 Farcry Demo??? WOW:eek:

No, have you a linky???

Azza

More on ATI's physics system.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1414

gline

Azza wrote:

More on ATI's physics system.
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=1414

i like this idea from the doc above

"ATI is able to offload physics processing to any GPU in a dual-GPU setup, regardless of whether or not the cards are in Crossfire mode or that they are even from the same family"

this is pretty cool, cards dont even have to be in croosfire or the same cards, thats sweet and will end up cheaper

vibe666

conzymaher wrote:

The Ageia Physx PPU is available to DELL, Alienware, Voodoo PC....... as we speak, and will be launched in May to consumers:)

Dell have launched a PC in the US with the Physx card in it running alongside quad (yes as in 4, FOUR!) SLi GeForce 7900's.

The XPS 600 Renegade comes in a custom-painted case inside which sit four GeForce 7900 GPUs each with 512MB of video memory ready to run games at 2,560 x 1,600. The unit also features an Ageia PhysX processor on which games can offload all their complex physics calculations to free up the CPU - a dual-core Pentium D Extreme Edition "factory overclocked" to 4.26GHz

they have a pic of the beast on the reg hardware site here: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/22/dell_sells_xps600_renegade/

there's also some stonking demos of whats possible with the physx card on the ageia website here: http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html (check out the cellfactor video, or if your your PC can cope with HD video get the hi def footage from the link on the page there. stunning.

looks like a great game in the making too, can't wait.

i wonder how much i could get for my g/f on ebay.

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Scruff

wow thats amazing footage in cellfactor!!!

i wonder will any of them bring out a pcmcia version of a physics processor so existing laptops could use it too....hmmm..

vibe666

i doubt that a pcmcia version would be in the works, unless they can make one that can do without the heatsink/fan that is visible on the one they're showing in the pics they have of the card.

wouldn't be surprised if there a mobile version out a year or so later tho, shoe horned into the latest top end gaming laptops.

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Azza

check out this link
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=9019&type=wmv

In the bottom left corner click on the Cell Factor training video to see PhysX Ageia in action.