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Ready to purchase a Physics Card?

Sundance_3 - Mar 9, 2005

		Sundance_3	Mar 9, 2005
		Has anyone seen this.... Apparently a company is rolling out cards with onboard processors (PPUs) for physics processing. While the idea is novel, I'm not sure if I'd be really excited about paying $100 - $200 more for a 'high-end physics card'. Considering that the general consumer market will be seeing multi-core chips become more standard, it would seem more logical to market the software end of it to run on multiple existing CPUs instead of creating a seperate piece of hardware that perhaps only a few software packages or games could be capable of using. I honestly this not lasting, but what does anyone else think?

		Curtis	Mar 9, 2005
		Sure why not? The physics you see in games today are nothing even remotely close to accurate - I'm pretty sure we don't even fully understand some physical forces, like friction, properly yet. However, I would think that if something like this does come to commercial fruition, they'll appear as part of graphics acceleratos. Maybe they'll market them more as "game accelerators".

		Berty	Mar 9, 2005
		I am still waiting for sound accelorator cards specifically for GAME use not recording use. I have got a $1000 sound card and it suck for gaming compared to a $20 SB live card. These physics card are a great idea but i feel that A.) They will be hard to program for, and B>) they will be made redundant by better processors. Curtis has a good point about them being part of an all in one "games accelerator" though EDIT> some keys on my keyboard stop working from time to time

		ExCyber	Mar 9, 2005
		I am still waiting for sound accelorator cards specifically for GAME use not recording use. I have got a $1000 sound card and it suck for gaming compared to a $20 SB live card. That's because the SB Live is a "sound accelerator card specifically for GAME use", and your $1000 card is probably built for studio-type applications where onboard processing would pretty much be beyond useless because you couldn't have enough control over it and it would introduce supply noise into the card.     EDIT> some keys on my keyboard stop working from time to time If you can afford a $1000 sound card, you can afford one of these....

		Mask of Destiny	Mar 9, 2005
		Originally posted by Berty@Wed, 2005-03-09 @ 08:34 AM A.) They will be hard to program for, and B>) they will be made redundant by better processors. I really don't see it being any harder to program for than writing your own physics engine. This is especially true as there seems to be somewhat of a trend towards using middleware in game development these days (except for some of the big boys like Valve and id, but they effectively become middleware producers as a result). As far as it being made redundant I don't necessarily see that as being the case. In theory, GPUs could have been made redundant by better CPUs, but there was room for them to get better and so they stayed ahead of CPUs. Considering how much there is to calculate in a comprehensive physics engine, I'd imagine that there's a good deal of headroom.

		it290	Mar 9, 2005
		About the soundcard thing, I've found that using my Audigy 2 ZS vs. my Soundstorm onboard sound only yields a frame or two at most, and in some cases can actually reduce framerates. EAX 3 certainly sounds better than the onboard when it works, but a lot of games don't support it properly, and I have yet to hear a game that actually sounded convincing (DOOM 3 is the best I've heard, and that uses its own sound mixing engine). I think a lot of work could be done on accelerated sound, but with jokers like Creative leading the industry, we're not going to get there for a while. As for the PPU, I have mixed feelings about it. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but I'm a little leery of anything that's going to raise the entry bar for PC gaming even higher. Sure, I have a decent rig, but a lot of my buddies (with whom I play network games occasionally) have dinky budget video cards, even if their PC is relatively new. If a game needs a PPU card to perform acceptably, it's going to be difficult to get people who aren't hardcore gamers to play it. However, if general tasks can be offloaded to the card (for example, let's say I'm encoding a divx, I offload that task to the card so that my main CPU is still not bogged down), that would definitely help sell them. Also, if these are on a seperate card (as opposed to being part of the graphics card), is PCI going to have sufficient bandwidth to make them useful? Or is this going to be a PCI-express only thing? One more thing - heat and power consumption. If this thing can't run without a fan and without drawing additional power (ie having to hook it up directly to the PS), I'm not interested, and I imagine a lot of people probably feel the same way.

		gamefoo21	Mar 10, 2005
		If you go to the site of the manufacturer they state it can be integrated into a graphics renderer. So I am assuming this thing is small enough to be on die or a small chip located near the die on future graphics chips.