PC Peripherals PS3 to get PhysX Chip

This seems completely redundant frankly. The Cell processor has wasteful resources (I'm talking about the SPEs). These SPEs would only come in handy if they were given some sort of task: physics and geometry. The PowerPC chip in the Cell processor is powerful enough for AI, and the RSX GPU can more than handle the visuals.
Now if the Ageia's PPU does the physics, you get a power hungry and completely under-utilised Cell.
Unless of course IBM can somehow manage to shut down unused SPEs to conserve power. Anyway, throw in your comments
 
Sony seems to create a ultimate PS3 it seems.
They want to extract every bit for details from there PS3 game titles it seems.

With the addition of that PhysX Chip the calc burden will now be shifted to the chip.

Lets see what will sony come out with as a final PS3.
 
tracerbullet said:
The PowerPC chip in the Cell processor is powerful enough for AI, and the RSX GPU can more than handle the visuals.
Click to expand...

Who said the physX chip would be handling AI? Physics and AI are 2 diff things. So if physics is offloaded to discrete chip, the cell processor is left free for AI. That means the bad guys will become a hell lot smarter.
Maybe theres enough number crunching power to incorporate something like the "Massive" technology used in LOTR. Now that would be trulely awesome.

For those who haven't heard of massive, check it out here
http://www.massivesoftware.com/index.html
 
I think u guys are confused. They are not putting in another chip, they are putting in the SDK - ie they have licensed the development tools, so that it is easier for programmers to use the same API (which wud supposedly be user friendly) to harness the power of the PS3
 
Ohh right, they've just licensed the technology...all calculations to be done by the cell processor itself. Thanks for pointing that out
 
zhopudey said:
Who said the physX chip would be handling AI? Physics and AI are 2 diff things. So if physics is offloaded to discrete chip, the cell processor is left free for AI. That means the bad guys will become a hell lot smarter.
Maybe theres enough number crunching power to incorporate something like the "Massive" technology used in LOTR. Now that would be trulely awesome.

For those who haven't heard of massive, check it out here
http://www.massivesoftware.com/index.html
Click to expand...

I didn't say that the PhysX chip would be handling the AI. You obviously didn't understand what I meant.

The Cell has two distinct areas: The main PowerPC chip and 8 other SPEs - Synergistic Processing Elements as IST likes to call them. These SPEs are basically vector processors and would be perfect for calculating physics.
So, my point was that the main PPC chip is powerful enough for handling AI. That leaves the SPEs completely wasted if the Ageia's PPU is put in to handle physics and interaction.

It doesn't really matter now because as KingKrool mentioned, PhysX is not being used, only their SDK NovodeX has been licenced out.
 
KingKrool said:
http://www.ageia.com/pr_05172005b.html
from their site. An old announcement.
Basically what these guys have done is port their SDK from regular x86/x86-64 to the Cell.
And now, Sony has licensed the tech, so that developers can get it as part of their development kits, rather than have to buy it separately I guess.
Click to expand...

Another link for aegia:
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=140

And guess who the CEO and founder of this company is..its an Indian :eek:hyeah:
 
Back
Top