ATI... Physics???

DanGerMus

hey guys i've been on the ati site a bit lately and the keep bangin out these ads about how they can do physics and stuff as in use there cards for it instead on Ageia. i'm just wondering is it actually true. and where could i get drivers for it or do i just have the wrong end of the stick?

satchmo

That's probably physics as in the HavokFX stuff - purely special effects stuff (particles etc), no real gameplay physics. You won't need different drivers or anything, it's all application-side and done on the GPU using shaders.

8T8

Yup along with what satchmo said it is mostly marketing with no real foundation.

There aren't any games that actually use the GPU for physics acceleration there have been some tech demo's showing the capability but no games as of yet.

Agiea's PPU isn't fairing too well either there have been a very small number of games (2-3) that support it with questionable performance but it really looks dead in the water at the moment.

Multi core CPU's is where the physics action will be as evident by Valve's multi core tech/physics demo which was held not too long ago.

TerrorFirmer

I thought there were drivers waiting to be released that could dedicate the card to fully power physics akin to Ageias cards.

I read on some newsite, when they were reviewing the PCI X1300, that as useless as it was for a gaming card it'd be handly to use as a dedicated physics card alongside your main pci-e or agp card or whatever....

8T8

That's mostly folks falling into the marketing angle again, a lot of noise but very little actually going on if you get my drift.

There are two ways of going about the GPU with physics use the Havok FX API (ATI X1K, GF6/7/8) or program to the metal with your own physics engine (only possible in ATI X1K and GeForce 8 series at the moment).

There are no games that make use of either method at this time, yes it is technically possible it just there is no software to make use of such features.

If software ever does come out then you will be able to use a second GPU to offload some of the physics to but performance may be an implication if I remember the early Havok FX demo's correctly you needed ideally a decent mid-range PCI-e GPU to actually gain any benefit. Direct X10 GPU's should be a lot better at this kind of thing so the lower end parts may be a more suitable choice if any games actually come out using Havok FX.

Multi core CPU's will do away with all this anyway as you don't have the drawbacks like satchmo mentioned & most if not all gamers will have a dual core CPU sooner rather than later, it is just a matter of developers taking the time to make the changes to their games (which the Xbox 360 & PS3 will force them to do).

DanGerMus

Thanks guys that has helped alot i've been trying to follow exactly what they were on about on the ati site and there info was so limited it made me wonder if there was really anything to it. So it just seems that there saying there cards CAN do it if they want but there isnt really a need and therefore no developers are takin it on.

satchmo

8T8 wrote:

Multi core CPU's will do away with all this anyway as you don't have the drawbacks like satchmo mentioned & most if not all gamers will have a dual core CPU sooner rather than later, it is just a matter of developers taking the time to make the changes to their games (which the Xbox 360 & PS3 will force them to do).

Yeah this is very true.. developers aren't going to go to the considerable trouble of porting their physics engines to take advantage of multi-GPU configurations for the small minority of people that have multiple X1x00 cards, when multi-threaded physics code that's already written will just work out of the box on multicore CPUs.