Chip maker AGEIA today announced their AGEIA PhysX(TM) chip, dubbed the world's first physics semiconductor chip.
Like a GPU, AGEIA's PPU is designed to offload work off the host CPU, in this case for physics processing. With a dedicated chip for handling physics, the idea is that game developers will be able to create environments that are more realistic. "By performing advanced physics simulations in real time, the PPU can respond to gamer actions as well as environments contributing to pervasive interactive reality. By introducing dramatic amounts of physics, games can now react uniquely to each input, adding a tremendous variety of game play. Physics will offer a host of advanced features including universal collision detection, rigid-body dynamics, soft-body dynamics, fluid dynamics, smart particle systems, clothing simulation, soft-body deformation with tearing, and brittle fracturing for destruction of objects in gaming environments."
Gamespot has an interview with Epic's Tim Sweeney on this new technology, and Epic's plans to integrate it into their next-generation engine, Unreal Engine 3. Here's a clip from the interview:
When people talk about physics in recent games, they mostly think of Unreal Tournament 2004's vehicles or Half-Life 2's dynamic objects. There, you have 10 or perhaps 100 big objects interacting physically in an otherwise static environment. Knocking chairs and tables around is fun, but that's hardly the apex of physics simulation.
The next steps are realistic dynamic environments, fluid simulation, large-scale particle simulation, and other very large-scale physical phenomenon. If you look at a modern action or sci-fi movie, and what's possible with the non-real-time computer graphics effects there, it's clear that major new physics innovations will be introduced into gaming as hardware performance increases 10x, 100x, and more.
What's our take? Wait and see. We still don't know much about this technology, AGEIA's website is incredibly thin on laying out hardware details, much less which board manufacturers would produce such cards. No doubt Intel won't look too kindly on another device offloading processing power from their CPU. If you remember the days of math coprocessors, you no doubt remember that there was only one game that took advantage of it, Spectrum Holobyte's Falcon 3.0. Intel ultimately integrated this technology into their 486DX and Pentium chips by providing a dedicated floating-point unit. It wouldn't be surprising to see history repeat itself again over a decade later.
