Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => Hardware and Software => Topic started by: Reschke on April 03, 2006, 01:07:08 AM
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Just wondering since these cards are starting to hit the market. I know HT and gang ease into some things but since they are out I figured I would at least ask.
http://www.bfgtech.com/physx/index.htm
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A card which currently lacks an application...or applications..
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The Ageia website lists a bunch of titles which will "support" the card, but they don't say how much any one game will actually use it.
I think it could have great applications for eye candy and interactive environment stuff, but if the developers won't learn how to use it then it'll die.
There are some places where AH could possibly use it though... I'm thinking clouds and smoke that interact with the environment and planes. Imagine a real looking smoke plume where if you fly through it, you see it swirl from wingtip vortices. That sort of thing wouldn't necessarily affect gameplay so it could be a configurable option, but it sure would look cool.
But just like dual core use, it'll take time for the developers to figure out how to do it right and I don't think anyone is under the impression that HT and Pyro are looking for more stuff to do :)
I think it's a HUGE mistake to simply dismiss dual cpu use and off-cpu physics calculations as being worthless, but it's not obvious at all whether the payoff would be worth the effort.
From a publicity point of view though, it could be huge. Imagine the "free" publicity if AH was listed on the Ageia website as being physx "enhanced"... It wouldn't even have to be much, maybe some more eye candy in trees and stuff for GVs to bump into. But once it's official, AH could get put on the official "AGEIA ENHANCED!!!11one" list and instant bonus advertising at the cost of however much time HT/Pyro put into coading for it.
My prediction is that AH will continue as before though, based on my impression that almost every new technology has been dismissed as not applying to [CK.WB,AH,AH2]. Eventually some make it into the game, but adopting every new technology into the game has never seemed to be a prioirity for HT. It seems like he's pretty busy with his planned upgrades even without chasing after the revolutionary hardware flavor of the week :)
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Currently this is little more than a marketing ploy. Its a product in search of a market, and at estimated $299, its also a product in search of a consumer base. Since we now see dual and quad core processors coming into the mainstream, I cant help but be extremely doubtful on the success of what essentially is an add on co-processor in the next few years. It may come to be something in the future, but we are talking 4+ years, considering that no products in development could truely be using this new cards abilities (no matter what the press release says).
This is compounded when you consider that multiplayer is becomming very important to many titles. How will you give one player full super duper hyper physics reality, and the other player next to him standard? They both have to see the environment react the same way, so we have what will be a chicken egg issue as is always the case.
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This product is a very high end floating point co-processor. There are no number of CPU's which can compete with it, for what it can do.
Actually, flight sims could benefit the most from it. Off-loading the flight modeling calculations could be a large benefit, as they couold be done faster. Being done faster means the CPU can spend more time with the other mundane stuff, like the graphics, networking, and/or sound.
A couple of the problems are the expense, and the time to develop for it. I am not speaking about HTC, in this matter. Just a general statement on the challenges for this product to overcome.
The cost alone makes it a niche product. Even in the flight sim world, it would be a niche product. So, you have a niche product being used in a nice software world. Translation: I really do not see how they are going to stay in business.
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Originally posted by ALF
Currently this is little more than a marketing ploy. Its a product in search of a market, and at estimated $299, its also a product in search of a consumer base. Since we now see dual and quad core processors coming into the mainstream, I cant help but be extremely doubtful on the success of what essentially is an add on co-processor in the next few years. It may come to be something in the future, but we are talking 4+ years, considering that no products in development could truely be using this new cards abilities (no matter what the press release says).
This is compounded when you consider that multiplayer is becomming very important to many titles. How will you give one player full super duper hyper physics reality, and the other player next to him standard? They both have to see the environment react the same way, so we have what will be a chicken egg issue as is always the case.
I am sure that any game that supports this hardware would do similar to how Anti-Aliasing was used in the very beginning on many games that said they supported it. If you have the option (card) to use that feature then you click a check box in your game setup and guess what you have it but "jim smith" who doesn't have the card over in nebraska playing the same game doesn't have the eye candy.
Unfortunately for me I will not be buying one because there are no games I am interested in playing that even use the technology. And from what I remember reading online and in print from places like PC Gamer, Firing Squad, etc...this card has been in development for a couple of years.
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Id buy it. Assuming its a 2-300 deal not a 4-500 deal.
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It's $300 USD for the BFG card that is linked there.
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If AH was updated to take advantage of it in some useful fashion, I'd buy one immediately.
Really.
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I cannot get to thier (Aegia) WEB site, from home or at work. The link comes up dead.
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The site is really slow for me.
Here's a link to their film clips:
http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html
Their site uses activex controls so it may not even exist for you skuzzy... Not a single real hyperlink on the site.
Here's the direct link to what you get if you click on their "developers" button:
http://physx.ageia.com/developers.html
eagl
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Where they show the real-time footage of the same clip in Ghost Recon is absolutely stunning what they appear to be able to do.
http://www.ageia.com/
http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html
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I think the flowing fluids weapon vid is extremely cool. That sort of thing would make trailing smoke and fires look amazing. Might even make gunfire, muzzle flashes, "hit sprite" effects, trees, clouds, well, pretty much everything look nicer.
The cellfactor vid is likewise impressive.
And it wouldn't noticeably affect gameplay so no unfair advantage to anyone using the physx enhancements.
Offloading flight model to the card is just a bonus :)
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Might make for an expensive entry fee for an AH beta test, but think about the cool vids if the card was fully exploited :) I'm thinking a new higher fidelity flight model, new explosions, smoke, etc. I suppose the ageia developer support model includes code samples that developers can use to help put the physx features into any game... Might help speed adoption and make the transition less painful if they are serious about helping developers.
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If Hitech and the guys are willing to give it a shot then I would definetely buy a card to see what they could do in a beta situation. I may go ahead and get one just in case....:aok
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Also, how about low-flying aircraft throwing up dust, or modelling the jolt of dropping bombs?
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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That's the beauty of leaving your old GPU attached. It can be used as a dedicated fpu.
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Looks like they make their money licensing the technology to the card makers...
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/20/nvidia_sli_forphysics/ (http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/20/nvidia_sli_forphysics/)