Ageia? Screw them, nVidia comes to the rescue!

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BassBomb

BassBomb

Diamond Member
Nov 25, 2005
8,390
1
81
thats a good idea i must say!

im not really for sli, but if we could keep older cards as physics cards that would be very good

call me stupid but is it impossible to reprogram an amd 64 cpu to be agraphics processor? and use that? lol
 
P

phreaqe

Golden Member
Mar 22, 2004
1,204
3
81
i am confused now. i just read a different article about this and it seemed like you did not have to have sli to take advantage of it, but this article seems to sound like you have to have sli. i think it would be much more useful if you did not have to have sli to use this. it could just use spare cycles and if you are not using all the pipelines it could use up those too. i personally dont care if i have 100 fps so it could also cap the fps and use the remaining headroom for physics.

EDIT: now i see that dingle gpu users will "see some benefit"
 
G

Gatt

Member
Mar 30, 2005
81
0
0
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
 
D

darkswordsman17

Lifer
Mar 11, 2004
23,444
5,850
146
Originally posted by: phreaqe
i am confused now. i just read a different article about this and it seemed like you did not have to have sli to take advantage of it, but this article seems to sound like you have to have sli. i think it would be much more useful if you did not have to have sli to use this. it could just use spare cycles and if you are not using all the pipelines it could use up those too. i personally dont care if i have 100 fps so it could also cap the fps and use the remaining headroom for physics.

EDIT: now i see that dingle gpu users will "see some benefit"
Click to expand...

I'm guessing they made it sound like that since if you're going to program the physics in there, you're going to want hardware that can handle it at all times, and not just in idle cycles. Since for modern games, the GPUs are pretty heavily taxed most of the time while playing, there wouldn't be enough idel cycles for them to take advantage of. Thus, they probably were pointing out that if you get a second video card, you can let it just do physics (and maybe help out a bit with the graphics) while the other one just does the graphics.
 
rise

rise

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2004
9,116
46
91
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...
unless you can just drop in a 6200 or 6600 to handle the physics. who knows.

 
J

JAG87

Diamond Member
Jan 3, 2006
3,921
3
76
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...

I've gotta say,
I'd much rather have 2 video cards in SLI (which give you a huge boost in all games) than a 299$ PPU which only works with Ageia's physics engine...
 
D

darkswordsman17

Lifer
Mar 11, 2004
23,444
5,850
146
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...

It depends on how efficient this new method is, and how well nVidia handles it. For instance, say they're able to make it so a 7600GT performs as good as the PPU and nVidia makes it so that you can have a more powerful card handle the graphics with a lower power one doing physics, then it could be worthwhile. Not to mention, isn't the PhysX card supposed to cost like $300-400 when it debuts? If so, then allowing gamers to get some physics benefits from a cheaper GPU which will likely drop in price much more quickly (and be replaced by something quite a bit faster sooner than the PPU will), then this would actually be better for gamers.

We'll just have to wait and see how they're accomplishing this and what it can offer consumers.
 
N

Nanobaud

Member
Dec 9, 2004
144
0
0
You can do this already by writing custom code to run on the GPU, but then you have NVidia (for instance) specific code blocks. What are 'Drivers' to be released going to do? Drivers are generally used to interface standard code functions (i.e. DirectX or OpenGL) to specific hardware. Are there any proposed standard interfaces for physics modules?
 
A

aka1nas

Diamond Member
Aug 30, 2001
4,335
1
0
Originally posted by: darkswordsman17
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...

It depends on how efficient this new method is, and how well nVidia handles it. For instance, say they're able to make it so a 7600GT performs as good as the PPU and nVidia makes it so that you can have a more powerful card handle the graphics with a lower power one doing physics, then it could be worthwhile. Not to mention, isn't the PhysX card supposed to cost like $300-400 when it debuts? If so, then allowing gamers to get some physics benefits from a cheaper GPU which will likely drop in price much more quickly (and be replaced by something quite a bit faster sooner than the PPU will), then this would actually be better for gamers.

We'll just have to wait and see how they're accomplishing this and what it can offer consumers.
Click to expand...

I can almost guarantee you will not being seeing Asmmetric SLI using different classes of cards. One, it will be too difficult to use them in parallell for games as the performance levels will be different. Two, if you can't use them in parallel for games, all you are doing is buying a second graphics cards to calculate physics. At that point you might as well spend less money and buy a more capable dedicated physics card.

Obviously SLI will give users some benefit from the Havok engine just because you will have more hardware resources to throw at it. The argument becomes more of whether it's better to buy $600(Don't think you would currently want to SLI any card that retails much under $300)+ of video cards, or one $300 video card and $200(or less) physics card. It's too early to tell which will perform better, especially as neither physics method as become ubiquitous enough that we can do performance comparisons.

I do hope that after the initial shakeup between the first gen of this technology, we might see a DirectPhysics API in the next version or so of DirectX. A standardized method of programming for physics would greatly speed adoption and then Ageia and Havok could write drivers to do it via the GPU or a dedicated card or whatever method they choose.
 
S

Sc4freak

Guest
Oct 22, 2004
953
0
0
Originally posted by: JAG87
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...

I've gotta say,
I'd much rather have 2 video cards in SLI (which give you a huge boost in all games) than a 299$ PPU which only works with Ageia's physics engine...
Click to expand...

And how did you arrive at that conclusion? Since the second card is being used for physics, you gain no graphical performance gain. And SLI physics only allows a boost in some games as well - games which are equipped with HavokFX.
 
L

Lonyo

Lifer
Aug 10, 2002
21,938
6
81
IT'S SHADER MODEL 3 SUPPORTING GRAPHICS CARDS, NOT NVIDIA ONLY.

Havok FX will support hardware that can execute standard OpenGL and Direct3D code at the Shader Model 3.0 level. If the AGEIA card and drivers adopt and support Shader Model 3.0 industry standard, Havok FX support will be possible.
Click to expand...


I HATE THE INTERNET AND MISINFORMATION
 
G

Griswold

Senior member
Dec 24, 2004
630
0
0
Originally posted by: Sc4freak
Originally posted by: JAG87
Originally posted by: Gatt
I've gotta say,

I'd much rather drop 150-200$ for a PPU than another 450$ for another GPU.

If this is how the vid card manufacturers are going to tackle the market, PPU will win, assuming of course some kind of dedicated physics processing becomes standard.
Click to expand...

I've gotta say,
I'd much rather have 2 video cards in SLI (which give you a huge boost in all games) than a 299$ PPU which only works with Ageia's physics engine...
Click to expand...

And how did you arrive at that conclusion? Since the second card is being used for physics, you gain no graphical performance gain. And SLI physics only allows a boost in some games as well - games which are equipped with HavokFX.
Click to expand...

Its rather simple. You benefit from SLI in any case. Be it for games that support HavokFX (much more likely than physx) or just higher graphics performance because of SLI and no HavokFX support. Its a win-win situation, whereas Physx is just something you cant even buy yet, costs you extra money for just one purpose and probably wont be widely supported if Nvidia and ATI mean business with their approach.

And then there will be those games that will offload physics calculation to a second core in a dual core machine in the not so distant future, if you got neither of the aforementioned solutions.

I've said it months ago and still think that Ageia's Physx will be a dead born baby.

 
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