CPU....GPU...PPU?

[cobalt6700]

Physics processing unit.....dont know if anyone has seen this...but it looks quiite intresting :D

BFG's PPU (http://www.bfgtech.com/physx/index.htm)

gaz

[ỒĊBłůē]

I've seen discussions on these already - over @bit IIRC.

It'll all come down to price vs. performance increase, and I think it'll take more than really realistic wavy grass technology™ to get the masses onboard.

Imagine that you'd just shelled out on an SLi/X-fire setup, only to spend another couple of hundred quid on that, find a spare slot to stick it in plus add another block to your loop to get rid of yet another fan.

We'll see I guess. Thanks for the link.

[CandyKid]

It will be interesting, but we'll have to see how many games are made for it... 20 or 40 games isn't much, though I was suprised to see such titles as "City of Villians" and UT2K7!

PLUR
CK

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

There was a news post on Bit about it and you need to have a pretty high-end PC before its worth it. The PPU unit allows you to have thousands of particles floating around your screen in a realistic way but you then have to have a GPU capable of rendering and animating them.

[Greeny]

The PPU units are available to pre-order at overclockers uk. £220~ish. Yowzah.

h**p://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/PhysX_Accelerators.html

[Greeny]

The trailer for cellfactor might be more to your liking Blue if wavy grass is not your thing:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player.php?id=9867&pl=game&type=mov

I'm too tight to throw £220 at an add-on card, but it sure does look good.

You say that this would only be applicable to a high end machine DRB, I'm curious as to the best of my knowledge one of the purposes of having a PPU is too offload some of the work that would be done by the CPU and thusly you would think to boost performance (ergo FPS) as far as a lower end machine is concerned? Certainly I recall this being said in the press previously. I see what your saying about increasing the amount of particles and effects on the screen though, certainly that will be more demanding.

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

The PPU will take the load off of the CPU but as your computer is now handling much more moving objects, for example smoke particles, your GPU has to be able to render them.

Quote from this bit-article (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2006/03/22/alienware_ppu_ageia/).

"We drive sales of high-end hardware," Andy Hess, Director of Content Acquistion for AGEIA told us. "When you have a PhysX processor in your system, you've gotta have that SLI. You've gotta have both graphics cards to handle the amount of data that we send out. We keep those guys really busy."

There are some nice videos to be found the on PhysX website (http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html)that show side by side clips of games with and without the PPU running.

[Squelch]

The Physics processing as a compnent board would be a goodsend for standardisation if it took off. As to who's "standard" gets adopted is another matter. It would not only give "wavy grass" capabilities to games but any other predictable physics phenomina too. Driving/flight Simulators would benifit by having much of the humdrum aero/friction work done via PPU leaving the CPU to do the gameplay and task scheduling

[Greeny]

Aye the Physx demos look very neat, good link worth a browse.

Looks like a real rich boys toy if it's going to need a lot of oomph. Pitty.

You have to wonder what kind of a shelf-life it might have with both ATI and Nvidia making murmours about being able to do physics calculations on the GPU. It's allready demonstrated that both their GPU have nice number crunching potential. Be interesting to see if either of them decides to get in on the game as well.

[Squelch]

I'm sure they will. A potential standards war looms over this if they don't collaborate. As for needing a monster CPU, that's only for first generation devices. The whole point of the PPU is to take the workload off the CPU for multiple iterations of the same complex algorithms

[ỒĊBłůē]

If both companies could squeeze this onto their latest and greatest cards (seems it would more likely favour x-fire to impliment it on the master card), the takeup would most likely be much faster.

[Squelch]

The fly in the ointment is M$. If they adopt it into DirectX first, then any hope of an open standard will be scuppered. As you may be aware, there are looming problems with titles appearing on Vista using DirectX 10 which have lot's of implications with DRM and lock ins.

[Da_Rude_Baboon]

I think i would like the PPU to remain outwith the hands of ATI and Nvidia. Ageia have stated that they wont be releasing new cards every 6 months and the PPU should have a long shelf life so although its a pricey initial outlay it will last. If ATI and Nvidia control physics on the graphics card they use it as an upgrade tool and would probably feature different levels of physics on different cards etc.

[Greeny]

They can reach a whole new level of price-gouge-ing. I'm sure the marketing department's are salivating at the thought. Lol. :)

[Squelch]

Those waters are shark infested my friends