Bits The Laws of PhysX

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/07..._ageia_physx/1

We chat with Ageia's Michael Steele and Dan Forster, who showed us a few of the new PhysX supported games and let us know just what they think about Crysis and John Carmack's recent comments.

[DLoney]

nice article. ya should of asked when the prices were going to go down.

[C-Sniper]

i wish that they would make the cards for the PCI-E X4 or X8 slot for their Nex Gen cards. im running out of regular PCI slots and if you add in Dual Slotted GFX cards then you are really down to 1 or 2 slots.

[[USRF]Obiwan]

If they really want to 'force' people into buying a psiX. Then we must be overwhelmed with eyecandy a factor 10 of crysis now is. If they can do that, sign me up for one.

[1e8o]

Originally Posted by [USRF]Obiwan

If they really want to 'force' people into buying a psiX. Then we must be overwhelmed with eyecandy a factor 10 of crysis now is. If they can do that, sign me up for one.

totaly agree

[Nature]

A mobo manufacturer should buy this company out (Like ASUS, or Intel) and incorporate one of these along the north bridge and make these a standard integrated feature in their chipsets.

[Tulatin]

Because, you know, it's always good to force arbitrary crap onto the consumer. While we're at it. let's make games that require an x-fi to play!

[Ramble]

If enough games supported it and it was in the range of £20-60 then I'd buy one.
Or, if you could use it for other stuff (which you should be able to) like compiling or FaH.

[Veles]

Yeah it still looks great, but I can't really see why youd want a PhysX card when you can get physics easily as good, if not better, with games like Crysis with normal hardware. That star wars game, force unleashed I think it's called, also has great physics, and I don't think that uses PhysX.

[Kayden]

The two things that would inspire me to purchase one is

1: Come out with a pci-e (either 4x or 1x) because I have only 2 pci slots and atm there busy.
2: Lower the price to at least $100 or less, there isn't enough support (at this time) to warrent a purchase greater than that.

[yakyb]

i'm going to bbe bold and say iwill get one for u3 ill let you know whatnits like with and without when i receive it

[Yemerich]

For those old enough will remember that piece of tech from the past.

In the 80's and the begginning of the 90's they were a must-have to all people who used programs with hardcore math processing like 3D Studio (for dos in that time). The years passed and those instructions where merged to the main processor.

I think realistic physics is "must have" for some games AND some proggies like 3D Studio MAX (now for windows). And i can see in the near future that things like the PhysX card will be merged perhaps with the GPU, CPU or the North Bridge.

Perhaps the guys at ageia shopuld aim for the 3d industry better than the games industry too.

[]'s

[Ramble]

Originally Posted by Yemerich

For those old enough will remember that piece of tech from the past.

In the 80's and the begginning of the 90's they were a must-have to all people who used programs with hardcore math processing like 3D Studio (for dos in that time). The years passed and those instructions where merged to the main processor.

I think realistic physics is "must have" for some games AND some proggies like 3D Studio MAX (now for windows). And i can see in the near future that things like the PhysX card will be merged perhaps with the GPU, CPU or the North Bridge.

Perhaps the guys at ageia shopuld aim for the 3d industry better than the games industry too.

[]'s

A maths co-processor is what you're thinking of.

[Firehed]

Originally Posted by Kayden

The two things that would inspire me to purchase one is

1: Come out with a pci-e (either 4x or 1x) because I have only 2 pci slots and atm there busy.
2: Lower the price to at least $100 or less, there isn't enough support (at this time) to warrent a purchase greater than that.

They still don't have a PCIE version out? Shameful. The earliest product shots we saw, well before launch, were dual-interface...

[completemadness]

Originally Posted by Yemerich

Perhaps the guys at ageia shopuld aim for the 3d industry better than the games industry too.

if you look at the partners list there are a few pieces of software
http://www.ageia.com/developers/partners.html

When it comes to the CPU side, dual-core, quad-core, whatever then the main problem is threading. How are you ever going to thread the two things together? It’s all about timing, when the physic effect hits then how is the second core going to time it and cooperate? At the moment, there’s not a single game that supports multi-threading even at a basic level. I reckon we’re years out with that and it’s already been about for two years. The games that are being developed now only use it a bit, for A.I. and so on where they don’t need extreme threading.”

I'm sorry, can someone explain something to me here

Whats the difference in sending a physics calculation to a PPU, or to another core of the processor, i seriously don't see the difference, in fact it should be faster to merge with a processor because you don't have to wait X clocks to get it over all the busses into the PPU (and then back again)

“We’re a hardware company at heart, no matter how much software we do. We aren’t stopping with the hardware at all and you will see next generation products from us in the future. When you think about physics as a whole, do you think we’re even close to tapping the potential of where physics can be? Nothing close. Think of movies like The Lord of the Rings with millions of things exploding on screen at once.”

I'm sorry to hear that, the software is where its really at, your can make the uberultramega hardware - but if you don't have good software to go with it, your going down the pan, this is a silly attitude to take
Something clearly isn't right with their software, otherwise there would be many more people signed up to use it (and its free if you add PPU support)

Maybe Unreal Tournament 3 will be that game which first crosses the line between simply providing extra eye candy and providing a fundamentally different game experience with a must-have status, but we won’t know it until the game is released and this is what really illustrates the problem Ageia faces; without a string of must-have games set up to use the PPU, few gamers will risk investing in a new piece of hardware, but with few gamers willing to invest in the hardware it still remains to be seen if enough of the big developers are willing to take the plunge and develop games which will require the PhysX hardware.

I dont think Unreal 3 will be it, but UE3 may be, people will be able to make games with a good engine, and make it require a PPU

Personally, they need to concentrate on good programming support, and lower hardware costs, when GFX cards came out they weren't £150 (or the equivalent at the time)
If they priced in at £50-75 (the price of a cheap gfx card) then i think they would shift a lot more units
More PPU's in PC's = more games support = More PPU's = more games

At the moment their real problem (IMO) is the fact that they are selling a £150 card with practically any software support

[Monsterdog]

Its a Chicken&Egg kind of thing really, isn't it? At least for multiplayer games.

Noone is going to invest in a PhysX card unless their game requires it, but none of the game developers are going to make that game unless everyone in their potential demographic already have the card. Any kind of developer are instinctually loathe to spend millions of dollars and decades of man hours on something they don't know will be a success because there just aren't enough people to buy the product out there.

Since most of the people who are interested in buying new hardware and upgrading their old for gaming purposes are online gamers (and usually of the FPS variety), getting a PhysX card needs some real incentive or it will just be a worthless hunk of circuits stealing watts from your power sockets. Furthermore its nearly impossible to make a game in this category that both satisfy non-PhysX owners and PhysX owners, for the simple reason that the revolutionary gameplay this hardware could potentially deliver would not be availabe to everyone who played this imaginary game online, making the impact of the PhysX hardware negligible.

So, as much as I hate to say it (I too loved the idea of the PhysX card when I heard about it), Ageia did not do their market research or at least did not make enough valuable contacts in the gaming industry for their hardware to happen in a major way. This technology will most likely die in this incarnation since someone will probably make a physics library like Havoc which will use the untapped extra cores that most gamers are getting these days, shortening the route the data has to travel (as mentioned above).

One free game, that disappointed in any case, is not going to win over the entire online gaming community, they would need a major title like the new UT being playable ONLY with Ageia PhysX to succeed.

Sad but true.

[Kayden]

Here is what John Carmack had to say about dedicated ppu

http://www.custompc.co.uk/news/60111...s-useless.html

quick blurb from the article
“I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs. Multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general, but when GPUs finally get reasonably fine grained context switching and scheduling, some tasks will work well there.”

I agree in many ways mutli core or gpu have great posibilities to be a great physics processor but Ageia is the only company who has put forth an effort to make physics a reality. Nvidia incorperated some features into the 8800 but how many people own one of those? What it comes down is programing anything is possible, look at linux for example there were may things that would not run on it 10 years and many people thought alot of things wouldn't but look at where we are now with it. Physics is the same way and asks the same question "How dedicated are you really to making physics work?" Ageia has answered it saying they are very dedicated and every on else just complains it isn't working with something more commen. Carmack if you were really devoted to the idea you be putting forth an effort to change it like you did with dx9 in the doom 3 engine so put your money where mouth is and make it work with something more comment but you aren't going to be spoon feed this tech it will come at a cost and Ageia was the only smart company to capitalize from it first and now your pissed because you have to licence the good stuff. I'm not trying be an advocate for Ageia but it seems that no one else but nvidia has put forth an effort (and a dismal one at that) here and I respect that have thats all, I do think they still have alot to prove before I spend $150 on a piece of hardware that isn't guranteed to give me a specified gain over so many games or apps.

[atanum141]

Originally Posted by Firehed

They still don't have a PCIE version out? Shameful. The earliest product shots we saw, well before launch, were dual-interface...

No they dont.
Personally i still dont see any use for them. The current power of hardware should cover most uses.

Also being pci with a molnex for extra power requirements is proper shameful. I would like to see a passive no powered version. The power requirements are far to high. And we need it to be cheaper. ALOT.

[iwod]

With a few tweaks. They should be able to improve the performance of the chip substantially. The current chip is build on 130nm. They could move to 80nm for higher chips per wafer. And if they make their software ( Driver and API better ) better they could stand a chance.
Make more software to be able to use it for acceleration. Like H.264 encoding / Divx 6 encoding. Matlab.. etc.

[Kayden]

Originally Posted by atanum141

No they dont.
Personally i still dont see any use for them. The current power of hardware should cover most uses.

Also being pci with a molnex for extra power requirements is proper shameful. I would like to see a passive no powered version. The power requirements are far to high. And we need it to be cheaper. ALOT.

I would rather have the option of PCI or PCIE there is no longer a vast amount of pci slots on a mother board and with my mother board M2N32-SLI Deluxe/Wireless Edition the PCIE 1x and 4x open might as well use them.