

BFG AGEIA PhysX Accelerator
The physics battle heats up






Updated 2/4/2008



Comments     Threshold


RE: Hmm...
By SirLucius on 2/4/2008 5:58:55 PM , Rating: 3
Agreed. If they just releases separate physics cards under the Nvidia name they'll run into the same exact problem Ageia is facing now. Nobody wants to buy dedicated physics processors if no games support advanced physics. But no developers will jump on the physics bandwagon if nobody has the hardware to support it.

Hopefully Nvidia will figure out a way to integrate physics into their new GPUs without significantly driving up the costs. This way more people will have physics capable hardware without having to spend more money and take up another PCI slot in their cases. Once people have the hardware, I think we'll see more developers implement physics into games.

RE: Hmm...
By TomZ on 2/4/08, Rating: 0
RE: Hmm...
By DOSGuy on 2/5/2008 1:46:22 AM , Rating: 4
A dedicated processor will destroy a general purpose processor in any test. CPUs can go quad core, and graphics cards can go SLI/CrossFire, but they will always lose out to a dedicated processor. No matter how many cores CPUs end up having, someone will devote an entire die to that task, whether it be hardware decryption for set-top boxes, or floating-point math co-processors from ClearSpeed. Dedicated processors also achieve that performance at a lower cost, and drawing less energy than it would take to reach the same performance with a bunch of general purpose processors.

Instead of adding more cores, CPU/GPU companies traditionally make their processors more competitive with dedicated processors by adding dedicated hardware to their general purpose processors. If physics are important to Intel or AMD, they could add a "physics processing unit" or special instructions designed to speed up that particular task. VIA added dedicated cryptography encryption/decryption hardware into their CPUs, and ATI and Nvidia both added hardware encryption for media content creation to their GPUs. Nvidia can now incorporate PhysX logic into their GPUs if they choose to. I won't predict what their plan is, but I can assure you that any dedicated chip that they produce, or dedicated physics processing unit that they add to their GPUs or chipsets, will blow away any general purpose processor in the same task, no matter how many cores it has.

RE: Hmm...

RE: Hmm...

RE: Hmm...
But the problem is, how dedicated is this thing really?

RE: Hmm...
RE: Hmm...
That, my friend, was a very bold statement.

RE: Hmm...

RE: Hmm...
By BansheeX on 2/5/2008 3:50:44 AM , Rating: 2

Welcome to the PC model of gaming.

RE: Hmm...
By retrospooty on 2/5/2008 8:35:13 AM , Rating: 2
To an extent maybe... With a small 3rd party startup like ageia using a proprietary hardware/software package that is true. But in the past Open GL, and currently DirectX prove that theory wrong.

By a large margin, the best graphics have always been PC, and still are today.


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