Lonbjerg
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- Dec 6, 2009
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Because hardware acceleration was going to be placed on the GPU from the PPU. It wasn't about hardware accelerated PPU's anymore.
My zest for GPU Physics started here from ATI and nVidia from the humble beginnings of the potential of HavokFX.
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Previews/havokfx-nvidia/
http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10649
That last link is funny, this tidbit hits home:
"We know the CPU can and will continue to push into the 1000s of objects for game-play; while the GPU can carve out 10s of thousands of collidable object simulations to add visual fidelity that no one thought was possible with an off the shelf graphics card"
Havok speaking.
Not NVIDIA PR.
GPU > CPU for physics...by a major factor.
This part was also interesting:
"FiringSquad: One of Havok's competitors' , AGEIA, has said of the ATI-Havok FX hardware set up, "Graphics processors are designed for graphics. Physics is an entirely different environment. Why would you sacrifice graphics performance for questionable physics? Youll be hard pressed to find game developers who dont want to use all the graphics power they can get, thus leaving very little for anything else in that chip. " What is Havok's response to this?
Jeff Yates: Well, Im sure the AGEIA folks have heard about General Purpose GPU or GP-GPU initiatives that have been around for years. The evolution of the GPU and the programmable shader technology that drives it have been leading to this moment for quite some time. From our perspective, the time has arrived, and things are never going to go backwards. So, if people are going to purchase extra hardware to do physics, why not purchase an extra GPU, or better yet relegate last years GPU to physics, and get a brand new GPU for rendering? The fact is that this is not stealing from the graphics rather it gives the option of providing more horsepower to the graphics, or the physics, or both depending on what a particular game needs. I fail to see how thats a bad thing. Not to mention that downward pricing for last years GPUs are already feeding the market with physics-capable GPUs at the sub $200 price point even reaching the magic $100 price point."
"Oddly" PhysX wasn't implemented on SM3.0 hardware.
It was implemented on the G80.
The GPU where NVIDIA began putting GPGPU into their designs.
So it would seem that AGEIA was right at the time...SM3.0 card were not geared for physics, the need a more GPGPU base.
Even the fact that NVIDIA bought AGEIA didn't alter that.
And that might explain why AMD/ATI hasn't delivered...a problem with the underlying architecture...a problem that NVIDIA is tackling by adding a lot of GPGPU stuff into their GPU's.
