Physics Cards/CPU? Wont that get added to GPU/CPU's?

[HDTVMan]

Physics CPU's or whatever you want to call it.

Cant those instructions/algorithms just be added to future generation CPU's or GPU's?

I love the idea but needing an extra card in the PC especially since small form factor is the way the market is going seems silly. Why not just add it to the CPU or on the Video card itself or just integrate it?

Thoughts?

 

[Sentential]

Ill buy it once it goes PCI-E. Old PCI legacy devices wont be lasting too much longer.

 

[HDTVMan]

Me Too. The only problem with that idea is we would need a third SLI slot especially since most of us would use 2 cards?

Also any idea what percentage or CPU/GPU is wasted on physics? What kind of speed increase might we see? Guess thats a developer question.

 

[SketchMaster]

The ?PPU? will help not what we have now, but what games could have if it did catch on.

What it will be used for is adding physics to things that at this point would stress the CPU too much. Like hair that looks and flows like real hair and clothes that also flow around a body and not look like they pit a box of starch in the wash. And water or lava that will move and splash like the real thing. Stuff like that is what we will get if some one makes a PPU that we can buy, and then games use it.

 

[Jeff7181]

No, you cannot make a CPU or GPU do the same thing as a PPU. The PPU is specially designed to be highly parallel and to specifically calculate physics using the NovodeX physics engine. Unreal 3 will use that physics engine. I imagine there will either be other PPU's, or some sort of hack that allows other physics engines to run on the PPU.

 

[biostud]

I would suspect it has rather slow production cycles, so it's a good thing having it on it's own board so it can carry over instead of buying one every time you have to buy a new videocard.