News Your games might get smarter...

[Da Dego]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/09...t_get_smarter/

[samkiller42]

OOO, that would be neat, playing single play BF2 and even the up coming BF2142, with uber smart AI

[wolff000]

It would be nice to have uber smart ai that actually use the terrain but how many game companies are going to change the way they program for an item that dosen't exist yet. Also if they do what happens to game play for gamers without the AI card? I think this is going to be just like the Physx card a great idea but no backing to make it happen.

[ch424]

I wish these companies would just produce IP cores and sell them to nVidia/ATI. Then we (as consumers) wouldn't have to worry about where we're gonna plug in our extra physics/ai/sound/network cards...

ch424

[wafflesomd]

Well hey, the PPU sold really well, I'm sure this will follow

[DougEdey]

They should stop doing this stuff, I don't like playing against AI (even though the FEAR and HL2 AIs were brilliant), so why would I want to spend £200+ on an AI card?

ANyone that buys this is basically saying "I am a loner and have no friends"

[DeX]

Haha, So your CS team mates are your friends are they?

Personally I think AI is integral to a decent PC game. I like games that involve me. Not me and a bunch of other random people around the world. Multiplayer games feel more like a sport to me. Decent AI in a game makes it much more engrossing and immersive.

I can't see this card taking off really. It's difficult to see what kind of benefits it would bring. AI doesn't strike me as the most intensive part of a game for the CPU and the only thing that makes a bad AI is the programming team.

[gideon]

now we need a processor, and a videocard (some sort of second cpu)
how will it be over a few years if this continues, spending $1000 on co-processors for: physics, AI, special effects, camera movement and a co-processor for every task you can think of?

[LoneArchon]

Originally Posted by gideon

now we need a processor, and a videocard (some sort of second cpu)
how will it be over a few years if this continues, spending $1000 on co-processors for: physics, AI, special effects, camera movement and a co-processor for every task you can think of?

Then there will be nothing for the cpu to do. With Intel and AMD moving toward muticore CPUs these cards seem more and more lacking value as the cpu now has mutiple core to share the Load. with quad cores coming out soon and muticpu support in games it seems like the bottle neck will crop up in other parts of the system such as the hard disks and system buses not in the cpu.

[Tyinsar]

or does it look like yet another solution to a problem that's not bad enough to fix yet?

Yep.

As far as I can see the only chance of survival for this or the PPU is to combine this, the PPU & other functions into a "Total Game Accelerator". Collectively they might make a significant difference but individually a slight step up in CPU power gives as good or better results, is good for other uses, and often costs less.

[MR BUNGLE]

- Might be feasible if they can hook up with AMD for their 4x4 stuff...

Would be kinda sweet to have mobo's for sale with onboard PPU and AI chips!
EDIT: Sod that, you're right - chuck it all on a PCI-E card, and create a proper all-in-one gaming platform!!!!

Still not sure I'd be getting 1 though!
(still on Socket A and 754 machines here!)

Anyway - good luck to 'em!

[TheEclypse]

That sounds awesome - I think ATI or Nvidia should talk to them about including it on a graphics card? SSF computers like mine cant take many cards....plus it gets round the whole chicken and egg..gamers will buy the latest and greatest cards anyhow.

[EK-MDi]

I think playing against bots on something like Counter Strike: Source on at Expert mode, is already too hard, thankyou very much !

[EQC]

Originally Posted by TheEclypse

That sounds awesome - I think ATI or Nvidia should talk to them about including it on a graphics card? SSF computers like mine cant take many cards....plus it gets round the whole chicken and egg..gamers will buy the latest and greatest cards anyhow.

Admittedly, you do have a good point wiht respect to solving hte chicken-egg problem...but isn't that going to increase the bandwidth and power and size requirement on the graphics card and possibly hurt graphics performance? With high-end graphics cards already requiring more power than high-end CPU's, and taking up so much space that an entire motherboard (slots above, below, and connectors near the slot) has to be planned around what giant card might come out next, seems to me like a separate card would be better. And don't forget that the GPU, PPU, and probably the AI-PU use their own ram, which takes up space on a board too.

A separate card also makes adding/removing/upgrading one thing ata time much easier -- what do you do when they offer a new high end GPU, but the PPU and AI-PU don't get a boost at all when all three are on the same card?

It does seem like an interesting prospect for the PPU and AI-PU to eventually be integrated as a few of the cores in a multi-core CPU...but again, you'd either have to have separate ram for each or limit them to using a share of the system ram (which is slower than graphical ram, etc).


One thing to think about -- how applicable would this AI-chip be for, say, a robot? If it can think about terrain and strategy and such 200x better than a CPU, it seems like if we could just give it a goal like say "get me some tea" instead of "shoot anything that moves," this AI chip might help out considerably in getting robots to be useful members of the household. All they would need is a visual system that can analyze the terrain and other obstacles to the task.

[jezmck]

I think it's a good idea.
It would be interesting to see how much harder games could be.

Originally Posted by DougEdey

...ANyone that buys this is basically saying "I am a loner and have no friends"

There are plenty of multiplayer games where good AI is important.

[Lazarus Dark]

this is getting rediculous. smaller is better. smaller is the future. give me a ten or twenty core cpu, some of them special coprocessers on die for specific functions like graphics or video encoding/decoding. ive got a ginormous case but its not so i can have fifteen addon cards.

[FeRaL]

Sooner or later they are going to have to make the motherboard a little longer to accomodate all these new add on boards if you want/need to have the 1337 gaming machine.

[DXR_13KE]

not for me. i want something like this, but i dont want to buy another card for my computer.

[yahooadam]

great idea in theory

but the Phsix card never worked well, and this is the same situation

The chicken - Egg situation ruins it

[otispunkmeyer]

get in another add in card

so that would be 2 x GPU, a PPU, a sound card possibly a TV card and now a AI card.... awesome stuff, if you can pay for it.

but seriously though why bother, we have dual core chips now, that in al honesty arent that expensive, and very few games make use of the second core.

quad core is just around the corner too, so even with new games there'll still be 2 cores left doing nowt... why cant they just do the AI?