Graphic Cards The PPU thread

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AGEIA Technologies has confirmed Asus as its first PhysX board partner. Asus will develop and market boards based on AGEIA's PhysX Physics Processing Unit, with units becoming available later this year. By then, some games may even be able to take advantage of the PhysX chip. AEGIA has announced that several upcoming games, including City of Villians, Ghost Recon 3, and Stoked Rider will use its technology. Interestingly, AGEIA's NovodeX physics software is multi-threaded, which seems ideal for not only multi-core gaming consoles, but also dual-core and multi-processor PCs.

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But the Physics is handled by the proccy, and I think with the GPU totally concentrating on gfx, the CPU can handle the Physics.
 
@ Chaos - well if xbox and ps have a dedicated physics pro it wud mean more
complex things handled smoothly.

Eager to know what sort of performance rise will be there in games as all
the calculations will be shifted from CPU to PPU.

Guys will we be able to used that on our Mobos [NForce 4 Chipset with curent GPU]
 
Aces170 said:
But the Physics is handled by the proccy, and I think with the GPU totally concentrating on gfx, the CPU can handle the Physics.
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Well with a cpu limited to doing physics, it can max calculate it for 10-15 objects in the scene. With this kind of a proccy, we're talking about 50000 objects. Thats massive!
 
50000 now thats massive. Maybe they can even modify it to handle a bit of AI, so the CPU can be just limited to run background Apps !!!

On second thoughts with massive PCIE bandwith, they can integrate the chipset with the video card and save costs too !!!
 
Why will you be running background apps while playing? It would be better if the cpu gets dedicated for AI. The games will be lot more involving with dedicated hardware for graphics, physics, AI and sound ( creative x-fi with eax 4.0).
 
Yeah despite all the obvious advantages i certainly wouldnt want to buy another $500 card for that matter. Btw i think Epic games are going to support the ppu in their future games.
 
Ageia PhysX Processor Unit Preview

Physics hardware manufacturer Ageia was on hand at E3 to give us a progress update on the new PhysX processing unit that it announced a couple of months ago at the Game Developers Conference. Ageia showed working hardware, and we had the opportunity see several tech demonstrations as well as a couple of game demos. You can download a ZIP file with all of the Ageia movies [RANK="www.gamespot.com/pc/action/eyeofthestorm/downloads.html"]here.[/RANK]


The lava effect is created by 6,000 individual objects.

Agiea president and COO Curtis Davis expects that there will be five to 15 major PC titles ready in time for launch that "will meet the wow factor and show something never seen before." At E3 this week, Ageia has announced that several games will be using the Ageia's NovodeX physics engine in upcoming games including Cryptic Studios' City of Villains. Only games that use the NovodeX software will be able to benefit from physics acceleration on the PhysX chip.

The PhysX chip will be the first hardware-based physics processing unit (PPU) released for the PC platform. Physics-accelerated games will be able to offload physics calculations from the CPU to the PPU much like how 3D-accelerated games process graphics on a video card. The extra physics processing power will let developers create game environments with a massive number of physical objects that would cause normal CPUs to grind to a halt. This will allow games to use effects like fluid dynamics or cloth simulation and to create gameworlds where a player can interact with tens of thousands of objects instead of only 20 or 30.


Physics accelerator cards will be ready in time for the holidays.

Ageia will begin test production in June and expects to hit volume production in September. Ageia is a fabless semiconductor company similar to graphics manufacturer Nvidia. That means Ageia will use a foundry to produce the chips and then sell the finished chips to board partners that will create and market the PhysX add-in cards to consumers and system builders. Motherboard manufacturer Asus and another "large OEM" will be the first to ship PhysX-based PPU cards.

While the final board specs will be decided by the manufacturer, the Ageia reference board design will include 128MB of GDDR3 memory. Initial boards will be PCI-compatible, but PCI Express versions will follow afterward. Retail boards should appear in the October time frame and should sell in the high-$200 range.
[RANK="hardware.gamespot.com/Story-ST-17585-1998-x-x-x"]
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AGEIA has announced that BFG Technologies will build physics cards based on the PhysX PPU. According to the press release, the BFG cards will use a standard PCI interface, have 128MB of RAM, and be available at the end of the year. Pricing hasn't been announced, nor have any details regarding whether BFG's PhysX cards will be covered with the same lifetime warranty that graces the company's graphics cards. Earlier this year, it was revealed that Asus will also be producing PhysX boards.

www.techtreport.com
 
As AGEIA startup approaches actual introduction of its physics processors, graphics firm ATI Technologies says that its chips are already capable of processing physics and it is only a matter of time for the graphics giant to enable the capability on commercially shipped units.
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Well, well, well. If the GPU will handle physics, why do we need a separate PPU? I wonder how the AGEIA guys will react to this particular bit of news. They are banking everything on their PPU being an integral part of the next generation of games.
 
Yup that and more ! the gpu wars this gen will be more than about FPS ;) Although i am pretty sure Nv has nothing like this remotely planned in even in their upcoming gpu's. Ah well...........now just waiting for whql drivers supporting the X1xxx features fully. :)
 
Well AGEIA has one thing - an already accepted and existing Physics API, which has been license by Sony for PS3 too. So they can always structure their products to be the most compatible a la MS.

And in the case of on GPU physics, it is plausible enuf, but is ATI telling us that they have some extra silicon in there for it, or that they will use the existing silicon. The second solution is bad, Intel tried it with MMX and failed miserably.
 
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