Physics Processing Unit

[Amplifier]

Just saw this link on overclockers.com.

Physics Processing Unit

Seems like a terrific idea to me... if games will support it. The Physics in games today are about as good as graphics were before GPUs were released. I'm tired of shooting the walls in doom and not having them break into pieces 🙂.

I wouldn't mind dropping a few dollars on this card if it made my games more realistic.

Does anyone know any more on this technology, is it vaporware, etc?

 

[GZFant]

that seems pretty cool to me, my only gripe is when are they going to make realisitic water effects? Meaning waves, tides and explosions that actually move the water.....kinda like Waverace 🙂

 

[Genx87]

Wasnt nvidia doing soemthign like this in their vertex units on the 6800s?

 

[piesang]

Great idea but am I willing to pay $100-$400 for it? I don't know.

 

[Jeff7181]

This isn't really something to help the video card, it takes physics processing off the CPU... I read a link the other day about it and it's A LOT more powerful than a CPU when it comes to physics. I'll try to find the article and the exact numbers... I wanna say it's about 6 times as powerful at calculating physics.

 

[Jeff7181]

Here's something...

This article says it would be about 100 times more powerful than current Athlon-64's/Pentium 4's.

Current games running on PC systems with high-end desktop processors, such as the Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64, can support roughly 30 to 40 "active bodies," or physical objects that can interact with each other in-game. This limitation doesn't give developers much to work with in terms of physics simulation. Simulating a building blowing up in real time is impossible with such a small number of fragments, but increase the active body count to 32,000 or 40,000, which the Ageia PhysX PPU can handle, and then you'll have an explosion to talk about.

I'm pretty sure games will definately use it...

The Ageia PhysX PPU will accelerate the physics for any game that uses the NovodeX Physics engine. Epic Games, the company behind the Unreal franchise, has announced that it is using NovodeX physics in Unreal Engine 3, which may be the 3D game engine developers will use to build games on in 2006.

 

[Boze]

I would pay up to around $150 to $200 or so for their highest end chip if it meant my games would play more realistically. The implications of this chip stretch far beyond FPSes for sure... flight simulators would be amazing, along with aerial combat sims. I can't even begin to imagine how much more badass every genre of games would be with this chip!

 

[Spike]

There is all-ready a pretty big thread on this in General Hardware (I believe). The consensus among alot of the people was that it is kinda a waste right now. They (and I) tend to believe that in the time when we are moving to fewer components to do the same thing we can expect to see a version of this integrated into future vid cards or the vid core itself.

-spike

 

[Jeff7181]

Originally posted by: Spike
There is all-ready a pretty big thread on this in General Hardware (I believe). The consensus among alot of the people was that it is kinda a waste right now. They (and I) tend to believe that in the time when we are moving to fewer components to do the same thing we can expect to see a version of this integrated into future vid cards or the vid core itself.

-spike

Yeah, it's sorta like when computers used to have math co-processors. They were used for floating point numbers, weren't they? Now there's floating point units built into the processor. There may be a transition period when these add-in cards are necessary to bring that kind of power to computers until CPU architecture and manufacturing can progress to the point at which it's more efficient just to build a PPU right into the CPU.