Originally posted by: The Mailman
is it worth buying a card for?
What do you mean? Buying a 3rd or second card for running just physics?
Unless by some fluke reason really cheap X1300s or something are amazing at physics and the higher end models aren't that much better (such as being restricted by bus speeds) - there's no reason to purchase a card just for physics unless you've got a spare lying around and have nothing better to do with it.
Even though I'd be thrilled to use an old video card to do physics, I don't think it would outweigh my concerns. It sounds to easy/convenient a solution to actually be a solution; I seriously doubt it can compete with true performance from a true PPU.
I don?t like how such an idea promotes half-assed solutions - not just from the standpoint where we?d be using GPUs as PPUs - but we?d be used half-assed GPUs to do it.
Imagine if today we could somehow take our old CPUs and plug them in as GPUs when whenever we get new CPUs. Would anyone want to do it? (this is a simple analogy where we?re going to assume, in this pretend world, that CPUs can equally perform the task of a GPU) No, because the old CPUs are slow which is why we upgraded them with newer ones, many gamers wouldn?t want half-assed GPU processing power just because it is convenient. The same should apply for the PPU.
The only good thing I can see coming from such a solution is that I think more people are going to be tricked into thinking that it is an acceptable thing (as opposed to the reaction to AGEIA?s most recent efforts). The more people we have running PPUs, no matter how half-assed, the more we get developers creating games to take advantage of such processing power - I think we?d eventually get dedicated PPUs.
