News More PhysX PPU details unconvered

Oh... crap!

first: $250!!! Thats $50 too expensive if you ask me. Damn, thats more money that I have spent on any single part of my PC (well, it has 2 sticks of RAM, not 1).

Second: 1Gbps network my @ss!! Internet is not gonna get there in a while, and even then, everyone will clog it dowloading movies... there goes my multiplayer addiction

Dammint! I was getting so excited about the PhisX chip...

 

Is there a reason you're not now? $250 isn't all that bad...I'd pay that much for a CPU and that much for a GPU, so this would be right in line. And I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make it all cope, probably without that...(I hope)...If not, well, that's why I play single player games and not all this MMO and MP crap.

 

This is the first thing ive heard about a "PPU", so basically does this thing do the same thing for Physics as a Sound Card or GFX Card does over onboard? if i do understand it correctly this could prove very usefull for new games if it catchs on.

 

You didn't click my link did you .

Death

 

Hmmm. Sounds like a lot of fun. Like digging a hole in the ground in Far Cry Ghehe. It has potential, but the price tag is putting me off. €200 is a lot of money (for me at least) and, to consider buying it, games need to support it. And I don't see developers developing engines for a device people aren't buying because it's unsupported. It's a vicious circle, catch my drift?

 

With graphics, you can write an awesome graphics engine then just render it at lower quality for worse cards. However, to write a completely new standard of physics engine requires a hell of a lot more effort. With physics, you can't write an incredible physics engine for the PPU and then make it more simple for systems that don't.

Basically, the developers have to spend loads for the few people that have PPUs now, with no guarantee they'll become standard. What the PPU needs is a more basic version for $50 so that they can become ubiquitous. Then we'll see support.

 

I disagree, mrhaz; the technology needs to be $100 for the best version and less than $50 for a respectable one. They have no chance of becoming succesful with $250 of wallet rape for something that is not even close to necessary in a single engine. I like the idea of a phyisics processing unit-but I detest the price tag. I havent spent that much money for a single internal component in my PC, and I cant think of many people out there who would pay $250 for actual holes in the walls.

 

yeah i dunno if you guys have a had a play with the novodex rocket physics demonstrator but man, i tried the explosion demo and it had like 17000+ bricks falling and exploding jenga style......it ran at less than 1fps, and i had to restart to get out of it. if this card can run that like water flowing from a tap then its worth it, and if devs can code for that in their games then its defo worth it. if i wasnt a studnet id snap one up the minute it came out.

 

...and it's only a matter of time before intel/amd/ati/nvidia introduces a similar technology in their processors, bankrupting this little upstart firm

 

Doubt it, it wouldn't be logical for them to implement it. The CPUs because a) it would require an ungodly amount of pondering, b) a majority of people with those processors would put it to waste (servers, word processing, HTPCs, etc), c) chip prices would go up even more, from R&D and more silicon and thus lower chip yields. Same reasons with ATI/nVidia, except b wouldn't be as severe, despite how many people game with real graphics cards, there are even more that have their graphics card never even enter 3d mode.

Until it *really* catches on or can be implemented in a chip that's under 10mm^2, you probably won't be likely to see it included in CPUs or GPUs. Perhaps you could find a card like, ex, 7800GT and 7800GT-P, where the latter would have the chip added on and the former would just have a blank space there, similar to how a lot of mobos use the same design and simply leave chips out for the cheaper versions. I couldn't imagine that happening until we're on 8xxx/XIIxxxx (?) cards - gen after next. You know, when IDE had died, we're on PCIEx32, we're using SATA-III drives (HDD, maybe solid-state, and optical) and mobos will still have floppy ports beause there's some arse left using them and doesn't have a then-commonplace 16GB flash drive. Ok I'm making stuff up, but you get the idea. That would be probably 2009-2010 (knowing SATA-III is slated for 2008) although next-next gen cards will probably be mid-2007.

 

just spotted this review of a PPU

PC Perspective

 

i would of thought with dual core ment to be arriving in ernest very soon this was a bit obsolete?

 

Dual cores wouldnt do much aside from spreading the load. Think of their performance as akin to dual procs.

 

Well, assume that games are coded to have AI (etc) on one proc/core, and the other dedicated to physics. You still coulnd't come even close, it's why software rendering of games is slow as hell - CPUs aren't designed for 3d rendering, whereas GPUs are. PhysX is designed specifically for physics (and a specific physics engine by the sound of it), so it will be far more effecient at the necessary calculations than a CPU would be. Rendering physics on a CPU is rather like trying to encode MP3s on a graphics card (assuming the software would permit it), it could work, it's just not designed for that.

 

Ultimately its a physics engine burned onto a chip.

 

I just hope that they can be OCed for better preformance that would be great then i could squeez every last penny's worth of preformance out of it lol

also dual core is not realy going to change a chips ability to preform Phisycis calculations.

 

You put that so well Roto...

ZERO, I doubt it. I'd imagine that they'll all just be designed to do X physics related things, and games will be designed around that, so even if you could OC it, you wouldn't get anything out of it because the coding couldn't take advantage. But you're right about dual core, it wouldn't make much of a difference. Even if you could assign physics solely to one core and everything else to the other, you'd be looking at only a marginal performance increase I think. The PPU doesn't allow for less CPU load so much as it allows for far more complex physics operations - you're talking about calculating physics for hundreds of times more objects than a CPU can deal with, basically giving you a completely interactive environment. The life engine, if you will.

 

Well now your able to see for yourself what all the fuss is about. After hunting arround the internet ive found a place that you can download a movie of the hardware in action.
I havent watched it yet as it weighs in at a mighty 102.7Meg and you need to sign up to be able to access Gamespots servers.
Anyway whilst im getting that done here is the link

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/eyeofthestorm/downloads.html?part=rss&tag=gs_downloads&subj=6125715

 

granted but i would of thought that too be generic enough for programmers to like it, it would need to be good at flops, matracies and other physical modeling requirements, not need the op-codes.

the problem i see is that if you go back away enough to make it generic enough for every game, you'd end up with a proccessor, and it dosen't need to have specail relationship to the video memory/vop so theres little merrit for having it?

I couldn't find any specs saying how quickly it can coupe with say a partical engine consisting of each partical having a movmenet vector, a simple flocking behavourer, and gravity. just seams to be generic enough to be handy, it would end up been a processor.

 

Well a VPU and APU are also nothing more than a processor, they're just less generic and can only design the tasks they're designed for. A PPU is no different in that sense. Again, go back to hardware/software rendering of games... a CPU is clocked six times higher than a GPU, yet a CPU can barely do anything useful when it comes to 3d rendering.

The thing with the PPU is that it's NOT generic enough for every game, it's designed for a specific physics engine. If the game isn't using that engine, it just sits there doing about as much as your sound card if you're not playing music.

IIRC I read somewhere that the PPU can handle like 20000 entities whereas the CPU can only handle 200. Not sure those numbers are spot-on but you get the idea.