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ATI: Graphics Processors Capable of Physics Processing
- Thread starter her34
- Start date
DaveSimmons
Elite Member
So they could do it, but too slowly to be useful.
Thanks ATI, but it might be more useful to concentrate on fixing your paper launch problem instead.
imported_BadKarma
Senior member
It'll be great if ATI can make Crossfire to have 1 card handling the physics calculation and the other rendering the graphics. It'll be even better if you can mix and match cards. Say, like the X1800XL and the X800PRO, with the more powerful card managing the pixels and polygons. I'll be all over it.
imported_Phil
Diamond Member
That's completely inefficient and totally pointless.
Why buy an expensive graphics card to relegate it to physics duties only, when you could just buy a PPU card?
Soccerman06
Diamond Member
I wouldnt want a PPU to be intergrated into the GPU just because that means more heat will be put on the GPU (even if they are seperate) and will just jack up the cost of the cards even more. I would rather have Aegis' new PPU that fits into a PCI slot.
And wouldnt most games that come out on the PS3 (Xbox360, Revolution?) that are ported to the PC support the PPU because the PS3 has a PPU, based on the Aegis PPU. I believe the Unreal 3 engine supports it, which means games that games based on the engine will also support the PPU.
And wouldnt most games that come out on the PS3 (Xbox360, Revolution?) that are ported to the PC support the PPU because the PS3 has a PPU, based on the Aegis PPU. I believe the Unreal 3 engine supports it, which means games that games based on the engine will also support the PPU.
imported_BadKarma
Senior member
I agree if you're starting from scratch. But if you're upgrading to a newer gen vid card, you can use your old card to do the physics calculation. Plus the PPU card is not exactly cheap, it's atleast 150-200 dollars.
stelleg151
Senior member
Well said.
VirtualLarry
No Lifer
It depends. The same or close to the same data-set that is used for physics modeling, could also be used for the graphics. Most games today only use a different (reduced) dataset for physics, and compute it on the CPU, because using the larger dataset would be impossible. But if the GPU could pipeline physics operations on the same dataset (say, using a subset of the pipelines), while also using them for graphics, that could be a win in terms of overall system performance/efficiency. (More than likely, it will continue to fuel the increasing prices of graphics cards, while at the same time making games more dependent on the GPU than on the CPU.)
If everyone remembers their PC consumer graphics-accellerator history - the first GPUs only handled the task of rasterization, while the host CPU was required to handle vertex computations. Something similar will happen with physics - today using the host CPU, tomorrow using a discrete PPU or a GPU as a PPU. It wouldn't be a bad idea to throw sound-processing into the mix as well, something like A3D 4.0 or something, with real occlusions and reflections for audio, based on a dataset similar or identical to the physics or graphics vertex datasets. (Perhaps with some sort of tagging, such that vertexes for detail meshes wouldn't get processed for physics or sound, only the structurally-interesting surfaces would.) Eventually, perhaps in another couple of years, we may start to see the next wave, true "virtual reality processors", which offload the computations of all of the essential needs of a virtual world, and the host PC simply becomes an appendix for overall gross control, and storage needs, to feed data to the VRPU. (Imagine Unreal Engine 4 running on something like that, perhaps.)
Btw, on many of today's GPUs, a number of the vertex processors aren't taxed to their full capability, so they likely have some excess computational power to spare for physics, although the future GPUs that would be more likely to be used, have shared vertex/texture computational pipelines. I kind of wonder if Cell could be used as a PPU fairly effectively, and how much more effectively a cluster of Cell procs. could be.