News AGEIA accepted to 3dMark board

[Da Dego]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/09..._3dMark_board/



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[DougEdey]

I spent £200, my E-penis is bigger then yours.

[specofdust]

Very smart move by Ageia. They just made their product essential in all of top of the line PC's built by OEM's specialising in gaming machines. No doubt that'll turn their fortunes around a fair bit.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by specofdust

Very smart move by Ageia. They just made their product essential in all of top of the line PC's built by OEM's specialising in gaming machines. No doubt that'll turn their fortunes around a fair bit.

I was thinking the same to be honest - it may not be in enough games thus far, but since many OEM's use 3DMark as their 'performance metric', it may become an important part of every OEM's system.

EDIT: One thing that does concern me though is that Futuremark is distancing itself away from 'the real world' even further. 3DMark used to be about graphics performance, but now it is about system performance. CPU clock speed doesn't make much difference in real games when it comes to performance (at least not to the extent that 3DMark06 implies). Adding Physics performance into the mix is going to detract even further too, IMO, as games like Crysis, Alan Wake, etc are using the CPU to calculate physics. At the very least, I've not heard whether the likes of Crysis and Alan Wake will have support for PhysX thus far.

Broadly speaking, it comes across like Futuremark is just adding features to keep BDP members happy without actually focusing on what made 3DMark a great benchmarking tool back in the day.

[supermonkey]

With all the talk of multiple cores recently, I thought the PhysX chip was already being phased out in lieu of moving the physics calculations to one of the processor's cores. If the OEMs build a quad core system, will the addition of a dedicated physics card really make that much of a difference? Is there a significant price/performance difference between a dual-core system with physics card, and a quad core system with no physics card?

Honestly, I've been out of the hardware loop for so long I really don't know what I'm talking about. But, I still don't think this can save Ageia.

-monkey

[EQC]

supermonkey:

for a little more info on what the physx chip can do relative to a high end cpu, you might check out this post I made a little while ago:

http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthrea...16#post1322716

I have no 1st hand knowledge...but my post mentions a toms-hardware article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/07/...physx_failing/

...toms-hardware seems to show that using the physx chip for certain very intensive physics calculations (fabric and fluids) is many times better than using a dual core AMD Athlon FX-60. So, in that sense, even with a quad-core CPU, there might be some advantages to using a PPU because it's designed specifically for physics, while the CPU is designed more generally.

In a way, I think the PPU is good for physics the way a GPU is good for graphics -- it's custom built hardware to do 1 thing very well. You still can't run high-end games without a decent GPU, no matter how good your CPU is...I suspect that if games start including more physics, it could end up the same way for a PPU.

But, with multi-core cpus, there may eventually be the option of actually making one of those cores be a PPU/GPU (ie: not a general core, but a physics/graphics-only core)...in that case, you'd still actually have a PPU in there and get all its advantages, but it would be more like Intel/AMD using Ageia's structure as a component inside one of their CPU packages.

[Tim S]

More here on PhysX too: http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/200..._review/1.html

[_Kat_]

YES! I've always supported Ageia and now finally those PPU haters (who live from their parents' money and won't be able to afford a PPU for a long time) will HAVE to shut the hell up!

[DXR_13KE]

_Kat_ people dont hate PPUs, they hate PPU fan boys (who live from their parents' money and won't be able to afford a PPU for a long time but anyway they starve and play on a realy bad GPU so that they can aford a PPU), and usualy people hate a monopoly, wonder why people generaly hate MS?

IF AGEA would open a little of its API and their PPU cards were cheaper and they were PCI express x1 and if mobos had more expansion possibility or had this PPU on board (like a gamers edition of a mobo).... then i would buy one.

and no i am not a guy that lives from my parents money, the only cash my parents give me is in the form of food and the payment for my studies, the rest comes from small jobs i do and birds i sell.

[Fatboy]

im liking the idea of Ageia liscencing their ppu tech to AMD , FX-62 with built in PPU core anyone?

[Dr Dark]

To be honest I don't care what or how - I still think having all this add on tech really sucks. I mean, DECENT CODE doesn't really need a PPU or whatever surely?

Just think - in time the processor won't even need to be as quick. If it's just going to sit there and manage IO instructions to the other co processors, who needs a 5gig proc?

To be honest I also think that this is, at the moment, nothing more than a "we can't use processors efficiently and at their proper speed, so we're disguising it by bolting on more overpriced and overhyped crap."

To be MORE cynical - dropping PPUs and/or GPUS into the processor core(s) is just another way to make more money from the uninitiated. There'd be so many variants of processor/core combinations, and I'm also tipping due to ATI/AMD and Intel, there would be loads of incompatibilities with application code.

Nah, I will stick with me FX2 and 7900GT - I get more than respectable results anyhoo, and by the time all this yahoo has died down I will be too busy with LIFE to care about computers!

[Risky]

This seems all a bit emotional to me. I can see merit in the tech and don't see why a physics calc is naturally a CPU task and more than ray tracing and the graphics stuff.

However I do agree that getting it into the 3D mark seems like a way of pursuading the uninformed that they need it when they don't, at least yet. Better a Physics mark on it's own.

If I was to buy one it would just be to have something else to watercool, so I don't see it happening. But then I haven't run a 3D mark bench for many years....

[Bindibadgi]

Originally Posted by _Kat_

YES! I've always supported Ageia and now finally those PPU haters (who live from their parents' money and won't be able to afford a PPU for a long time) will HAVE to shut the hell up!

What because 3dmark now use them to get a better score? Woo-hoo. One title I'll never use and we'll never use on the site and only those who post on futuremark forums really care about.

I dont live off my parents money, and im not wasting 200 on something that has literally no current use and will still have little to no future use. Certainly no required use.

[Warrior_Rocker]

Originally Posted by Dr Dark

To be honest I also think that this is, at the moment, nothing more than a "we can't use processors efficiently and at their proper speed, so we're disguising it by bolting on more overpriced and overhyped crap."

Good show mate, Exactly what I was thinking.

I still run my p4 3.0E prescott proc, Personally I do not see my self upgrading cpu's in the next 2 to 3 years. Personally its fast enough for everything I ask it to do, I play ut2004, COD2 the likes. But when did it become that we actually needed 4 cores on a cpu when 1 effecient core would have done the task? Instead we add more code to fix the bad code, more cores, more hardware to fix the old bad hardware. More crap to not only confuse us all but waste our money to be right back where we started.

As a programmer it is sad to think of those at large game producers. Writing things in all high level code, taking 18 instructions to do the work of 2?

When did we honestly need computers at home faster than servers in a corporate enviroment to play what? Fear? Oblivion?

[Deafguy256]

Originally Posted by Warrior_Rocker

Good show mate, Exactly what I was thinking.

I still run my p4 3.0E prescott proc, Personally I do not see my self upgrading cpu's in the next 2 to 3 years. Personally its fast enough for everything I ask it to do, I play ut2004, COD2 the likes. But when did it become that we actually needed 4 cores on a cpu when 1 effecient core would have done the task? Instead we add more code to fix the bad code, more cores, more hardware to fix the old bad hardware. More crap to not only confuse us all but waste our money to be right back where we started.

As a programmer it is sad to think of those at large game producers. Writing things in all high level code, taking 18 instructions to do the work of 2?

When did we honestly need computers at home faster than servers in a corporate enviroment to play what? Fear? Oblivion?

I agree with this for the most part. AMd Athlon 3000/Intel 2.8GHZ or higher is still perfectly fine for gaming as long as you have 1GB of ram (or higher) and excellent graphic card. Say I upgrade to quad core CPUs at the end of this year with 2 GB of ram, the only thing I would have upgrade for the next 5-6 years is graphic card if needed. However, dual core CPUs has been out for too long and now, some vdieo games are FINALLY taking advantage of it. Alan Wake require dual core CPUs. Other games that are possibly taking advantage of it are Crysis and UT 2007 (correct me if I'm wrong).

[DougEdey]

Crysis and UT2k7 have both been confirmed to be Dual core RECOMMENDED, min specs are single core.