What is this?

[Fear]

I guess I was bored and stumbled into "personalizing my dell" on dell.com (don't ask) and I discovered I can add something called a "Phyisics accelerator" ( I think thats how you spell it )

Anyways, What is a Phyisics Acellerator, and what does it do?

[DaveW]

Ageia make the physics accelerator chip. It's a special processor that goes into a PCI or PCI-e slot and does physics calculations to make game more realistic. It's a great idea but major movers and shakers are sticking with the old Havok Physics system, which is bad news for us. If they came down in price and got some more games behind them, I'd definitely buy one, despite being a new technology.

-Dave

[Ronyx]

it's completley useless for now but once games begin to strain video cards and calculating physics and stuff becomes a major drag down then those will become usefull. For now, don't throw your money away.

[AKA_RA]

Its require for some games, but just adds extra eye candy for other games. One of the Tom Clancy game has a very noticeable differance when playing with a PPU, just not what i would consider worth the extra $200 unless you already have the best of the best.

[DaveW]

it's completley useless for now but once games begin to strain video cards and calculating physics and stuff becomes a major drag down then those will become usefull. For now, don't throw your money away.

That's really the problem though, every piece of new hardware needs early supporters, and Ageia don't have enough. They need some more major companies to jump on the bandwagon, or for everyone of us to bite down and buy a card. (unlikely). The physics processor is the future of video games in my opinion, and Havok physics is outdated. I want to see every pipeline of my ATI x1900xtx rendering me lovely pixels, not working out which corner the box i've tossed with my gravity gun should land on.

-Dave

[AKA_RA]

Its pretty much a catch 22. People wont buy whats not needed, and companies dont want to add support for a piece of hardware no one owns. If i could be assured an Ageia card would be helping the games i will be playing a few months from now, sure, ill drop 200 bux.

[DaveW]

If i could be assured an Ageia card would be helping the games i will be playing a few months from now, sure, ill drop 200 bux.

100% with you on that one.

-Dave

[Cevinzol]

If the physics proccesor could be used for other things besides just games, it would have broader market apeal. For instance if it could be harnessed for distributed proccessing (ie. folding protiens or SETI@home) or speed up CAD/3D rendering. Heck lets lie to people and tell them it will filter out spam and prevent pop-ups then everyone will buy it :)

[DaveW]

I think they already speed up CAD and 3D rendering. Not certain tho.

-Dave

[ESX]

I think they already speed up CAD and 3D rendering. Not certain tho.

-Dave
I doubt it. A regular 3D render has nothing to do with physics. IMO

[AJ@PR]

I think they already speed up CAD and 3D rendering. Not certain tho.

I doubt it. A regular 3D render has nothing to do with physics. IMO
"CAD and 3D rendering" is very broad.

Doesn't 3D Studio Max try and give physical attributes to rendered stuff?
I think that for various things, both AutoCAD and 3DSMax actually *do* 'physics calculations'.

Just my thoughts...

[DaveW]

I doubt it. A regular 3D render has nothing to do with physics. IMO

I'm talking about software like 3DS max and so on, where there are some physics calculations involved. At least, i think there are...it's been a while.

-Dave

[ESX]

I'm talking about software like 3DS max and so on, where there are some physics calculations involved. At least, i think there are...it's been a while.

-Dave
Well, cant argue on that as I dont know if they are involved or not :)

[ajmilton]

i believe raytracing is considered physics :P light reflection/refraction etc. damned useful stuff in 3d rendering

[DaveW]

i believe raytracing is considered physics :P light reflection/refraction etc. damned useful stuff in 3d rendering

I think that stuff is handled by the rendering card. Bump-maps, reflections, water effects, light effects, water effects, particle effects, are all currently handled by the GPU.

The physx cards do Particle physics (in otherwords flames, water sprays, some special effects) and water effects (transparency, surface reflections, etc).

The big difference is mainly in the Particle effects and the ability to take the pressure of calculating physics in-world from the GPU. These are the bonuses that sadly, the launch games don't take advantage off.

-Dave

[ESX]

Oh yea, forgot about this: It cant accelerate processes that dont use it.
I mean that the program has to be PhysX-enabled to actually accelerate the process of physics calculations using the Aegia PhysX card.

So the physics-acceleration option is dropped. I think.

[nil8]

The only real marketable way I can think of would be include it in the cpu. Since we're moving into quad core technology, it might not be a bad idea to dedicate a single core to physics processing when applicable and return to normal processing when applicable.

Then again I'm not a computer mech engineer and have no clue how to implement this.

[DaveW]

This is on the ATI/AMD roadmap-possibly-according to one of the Links in Slug Toy's front page article.

Physics, Graphics, and Sound are the only things that really warrant their own processor, and the Physics Processor is going to pretty limited in terms of actual use in everyday scenarios. Therefore, i'd say a built in PPU would be a waste of resources. Better to have general purpose Processors and be able to configure them to run powerful instruction sets.

-Dave

[Omega]

it's completley useless for now but once games begin to strain video cards and calculating physics and stuff becomes a major drag down then those will become usefull. For now, don't throw your money away.

Correction. Aegia's "PhysX" card is not completely useless. A few (say, less than ten) games can actually utilize the technology -- and the difference is very noticeable. More realistic fog (that actually follow laws of fluid dynamics and are affected by lighting), more realistic water (once again, following laws of fluid dynamics and lighting, etc), and so forth are achievable with the Aegia PhysX.

Now, in the real world, where most of us are, yeah, it's useless. It won't make WoW, BF2, UT2k4/2k3, etc look any better, so it's a waste of cash for us.


-Omega

[DaveW]

and the difference is very noticeable.

Unfortunately a software hack was discovered that means you can get some of the Physx encancements without a physx card and it lowered the average fps by 1frame.

Obviously, this is a misleading situation: the physx enhancements are mostly lost. But it's still a bad thing for your sposors to discover. Hence the reason we've not seen people jumping on the Physix Bandwagon.

The demo they put together was very, very, nice though. Try having a look on you tube for a Physx Barrel Demo, or a Physx Flag demo. They look good. Games need this technology-havok, despite what anyone else says, is on it's last legs. It's powerful but it pushes current tech to the limit.

-Dave