In made a thread about Physics as the next graphics earlier this year, And now, they anounced the first PPU card to be comercialised. It will fit into a PCI slot. Here's the 3 first games that will take advantage of it. That's pretty damn impressive, especially the Cell Factor video. http://media.gear.ign.com/articles/697/697450/vids_1.html I still think Physics can take the place of graphics. Those games arent amazingly looking, graphic wise, but i've never been that impressed by a game since a long time.
I like this idea too. How does this card actually work? I thought physics was just implemented in the games itself? Awesome demos!
generally, physics are handled by the cpu. This card remove the stress made by the Physic on the cpu, a bit like a video card remove stress from the cpu for the rendering.
Its really a full fledged CPU doing all the physics work and thus creating very "spontaneous" physic effects. I played some of the Cell Factor level and the amount of fun you can have with the barrels and pipes is just tremendous.
PCI??? Why using such a low bandwidth Bus? For the kind of calculation it needs to achieve, I would have thought PCI Express would be used. I thought the card would have been release on PCI Express x4 format. Oh well at least it'll benefit a wider audience. Sabre
As I havn't tried them myself yet I don't know this.. but when I talked to them at e3 we talked a bit about if the programmer would have any detailed controll over the cards (i.e. programmable piplines like gfx-cards have their shaders). I know they said that was something they wanted to do and not just have a AddCollidableObject() function.. so my question to all people here that has tried them out is there something like this on the cards? edit: after thinking about it I remember reading about someone doing a normal map calculater on a physX card. So I guess the answear is yes.
There will be both PCI and PCI xpress versions. Actually I think it will only be PCI Xpress. That is just a card sent out to developers.
Sorry but wouldnt having something like this mean multiplayer games wouldnt work out very well unless all players have the card... Say something blows up one person with a card gets a huge explosion with things flying far and hitting people and the other doesnt?
Now I'm not 100% sure, but I believe that any multiplayer game that uses the physx card requires that all other players have the card as well. Games like Cell Factor requires that all players have the card in order to the proper reactions to be created for the players because you can kill other players objects lying around the levels.
It would probably just graphic-lag like crazy if you force your CPU to do all the physics work as well, in multi or singleplayer.
Aye, unless you are uber hardcore (or very rich) dual graphic cards is the better option. There was an article about it in Edge last month I believe.
Dell already offers an XPS unit with dual 7900 cards and a Ageia PPU. goes for almost $10Kh: Anyways, that card looks worse than a 1998 Voodoo2:lol:
So this should be the case with the 360 and PS3. Didn't AGEIA release a PhysX SDK for both of them a while back?
Indeed they did, but it's more of a general physics SDK rather than the way they handle things with the PC. Middleware to help with threaded code and the like.
i have twin xeons to cope with the physics no sale here unless a major game jumps on it (thinking quake wars / battlefield 2142)
