AGEIA PhysX support coming for AH?

[Kev367th]

I'd be willing to get one for a beta test.

If games like Unreal etc are going to support it you can almost guarentee it's going to become the next 'big' thing.

Just looked at its specs, holy crap -

Peak Instruction Bandwidth: 20 Billion/sec
Sphere-Sphere Collisions: 530 Million/sec max
Convex-Convex (Complex Collisions): 533,000/sec max

Imagine dropping a VH and instead of a flattened building just appearing, seeing loads of debris flying around.
Oil and fuel leaks that are absolutely stunning.

etc etc etc.

[Reschke]

Better yet imagine flak bursts or the potential of a flak burst. I have no ide what they must have been like to fly through but I bet that was a real kick in the nuts in any aircraft.

[qts]

The cost isn't that bad. Remember the cost of the old Voodoo graphics cards? And how many people have SLI graphics?

Interesting that it's a 64-bit PCI card.

I think the killer for most people will be the FPS games. Imagine some of those levels in Doom with exploding barrels going all over the place!

How would it benefit AH? Hangars have been mentioned. It might make torpedoes better. How about the effect of a really close miss?

[qts]

Also, how about low-flying aircraft throwing up dust, or modelling the jolt of dropping bombs?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

What physx does can be done with any modern graphics card with a programmable gpu. This means that when you upgrade your graphics you can leave your old card in your system and use it for physics calculations just like the ageia product does.

Both ATI and Nvidia are currently working on the subject - only downside being that you need dual 16x pcie.

What I would really love to see is realistic bomb explosions with pressure waves and white-hot sparkles flying around with smoketrails. That would look megacool.

[Reschke]

I'll bite on this one simply because I want to know. How is a graphics processor going to handle the physics without some major modification of the code that the chip itself runs? BUT why do you want a second dual 16X PCI-E slot on your board? Aren't companies like nVidia and ATI coming out with dual and even quadruple GPU single slot cards?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

While a separate add-in-card containing a dedicated processor is one option, there is another option that may already be in your computer, your video card. This idea isn’t actually new. There has been a big push since programmable GPUs have evolved to use them for other tasks. With their programmable nature they are capable of doing more than just 3D rendering. We know they can render 3D many times faster than a CPU, which is how we get such beautiful graphics in our games, so what if we used that power that is sitting there to do more than just 3D. That is what NVIDIA and actually ATI as well are proposing.

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTAwNSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

The whole point about the extra x16 slot is to make use for your old GPU that you no longer would otherwise need.

[Skuzzy]

A graphics GPU is nothing more than a scalar floating point unit.  A very dedicated and complex unit which offers substantial performance gains over the all-purpose FPU in the CPU.

GPU's also perform transformations for all 3D graphics as it is.  This is the math to move an object around in 3D space.

I really detest the marketing hype about these operations.  They are not performing *physics*.  They are doing floating point math calculations.  Nothing more.  The equations could be physics related, but they can also be geometric, algebraic, and/or trigonomic in nature.

It just sounds cooler to say they are doing *physics*.  Yes, there is no reason why the GPU cannot perform the same operations as the AEGIA product performs.  It just may not be able to do it as well, due to other operations the GPU must handle.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

That's the beauty of leaving your old GPU attached. It can be used as a dedicated fpu.

[LePaul]

Looks like they make their money licensing the technology to the card makers...

http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/20/nvidia_sli_forphysics/