PPUs! It's about flocking time!

[Gryph]

Now that games are using physics much more it's about time that someone made a Physics Processing Unit. Someone finally has, I present to you the PhysX: http://www.ageia.com/

 

It'd be nice to offload the physics processing which is done solely on the CPU onto a seperate processor which will increase the amount of physics in games. I feel this is the one segment in games which will truely make them more realistic since graphics are already damn good. Right now the most physics in a game is Half-Life 2 and that's really not that much. Imagine fluid dynamics, realistic particle effects, more physical objects...drool.

 

Anyway, here are some more links that deal with this.

http://www.gamers-depot.com/interviews/agiea/001.htm

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/08/news_6119895.html

An interview with Tim Sweeney: http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/08/news_6119896.html

Microsoft's XNA will support it: http://news.teamxbox.com/xbox/7778/Microso...ces-XNA-Studio/

UbiSoft will support it too: http://www.ageia.com/pr_03082005b.html

[Agozer]

Bah, a PPU should still be a post-processing unit.

 

Besides, I'm not contributing one drop of drool until I see something "solid".

 

XNA is evil.

[Gryph]

It would be nice if video card manufacturers licensed this tech and put it on their cards so we don't need two of them.

[Wizard]

Bah, a PPU should still be a post-processing unit.

 

Besides, I'm not contributing one drop of drool until I see something "solid".

 

XNA is evil.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Besides easy porting to PC and being owned by Microsoft. It rivals Nintendo's devkit in the ease development department.

[Gryph]

Here's a new interview where some of my questions are answered: http://www.cgonline.com/content/view/451/2/

 

Also, this will be available to motherboard and laptop manufacturers as well as add in card vendors.

 

Computer Games - How will the technology first be sold to the public? Will it only be available via PC game manufacturers at first or will there be stand alone cards that can be bought in stores and online? Also what is the target price for the first products?

 

Curtis Davis - We expect the first products that hit the market to be add-in boards and possibly a combination of other solutions.  Cards could run anywhere from $100-$400, depending on the implementation the board vendor chooses.

 

Also it'll take about 25 watts of power which isn't too bad.

 

If it's around $100-150 I probably won't mind. Well I won't mind till the majority of games start using it. But since there are quite a few games that have licensed the Unreal Engine 3, I'll probably cave. But $400 is going to be a bit steep I think...meh. So now that's going to be ~$500 graphics card + ~100-400 physics + cheap as hell Audigy. My next upgrade is going to be a biatch.