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I hope the NVIDIA acquisition and now this news will drive the adoption of the PhysX Engine. Right now, if you look at the list of titles, the PhysX Engine is not used by many games (namely, mostly Unreal3-Engine titles).

If the adoption picks up, maybe Havok (which is now Intel property) will not remain the only physics engine in town, but right now, this news will not affect a whole lot of games...

So none of his games will be using this, http://www.ageia.com/physx/, then?

Lies, lies and more lies. How is Microsoft screwing Apple in this situation?

The iPhone doesn't have to interact on any level with DRM, and the component parts of my system that do interact with it (audio, video) have full 64-bit driver support. I should know, I'm using 64-bit Vista. Even better, XP doesn't have any of the same support for Blu-ray/HD-DVD DRM, so how are they not able to code XP 64-bit drivers? Apple have no excuse in this situation when plenty of hardware manufacturers are able to code them.

Then you reel off the same stupid list that you repeatedly cite to show that 'M$ am bad' which has been debunked a hundred times by Windows and Linux users alike.

Your final sentence is a gem that sums up the rest your post: "Windoze is like barren". What does that even mean?

The cleaning analogy is perfectly apt!

If 100 people cleaned your house, they "wouldn't get shit done".

If 100 people cleaned Prof. Vishkin's house, they would be finished in about 3 minutes.

How this is better than Intel's 80-core processor remains to be seen. This "technology" looks like it's an overhyped version of GPGPU or PhysX.

Since MS has made the decision not to support DX10 in XP, I doubt that any games will require DX10 for about 2 years or so. Until then, the games developers would probably be limiting their target audience too much until the majority of their target audience has gone through a computer upgrade cycle.

True, but the gaming enthusiast in me hopes that while some games might not /require/ it, some might have some additional support for it. Similarly, some games have additional features if you have a PhysX card but still don't require it, I'm hoping that some games tack on the bells and whistles that DX10 supposedly has for early adopters :P

Who, exactly, do they think is going to use this besides amateurs and little tools companies (like the ones linked to in the article) who cater to amateurs...?

Sony (PS3 SDK). Epic (Unreal Engine 3). Nvidia (FX Composer). AGEIA (physics).

XML provides more than just a way of serialising a tree into text - I've not looked into the details very far, but what I've seen is that COLLADA uses XML Schema for validation, URIs for references between different locations (e.g. defining a piece of geometry, then adding several instances of it into a scene definition - and then changing it into an external URI if you don't want everything in the same file, or if you want to point to binary data instead of more XML, and having the standard XML tools deal with that correctly), and you can stick custom bits of XML into certain extension points (which standard tools can't parse but can pass along unchanged for later tools). You could do all that without XML, but the designers decided it would be more successful if they did use it.

If your artists can export a model from 3ds Max, load it into FX Composer and tweak the shaders to make it look good, load it into a physics simulator to make sure it reacts sensibly, then have it converted into the optimised native format for whatever engine you're using - and if you're no longer constrained in choice of tools (maybe you want to change from Max to Maya, or support a modding community with Blender, or load assets from your last game into your new engine) because they all support the same standard format, and you don't have to write all the code yourself - then it seems like it can have a practical benefit. I'm sure it doesn't work perfectly in practice, and it's not going to give groundbreaking improvements to the game development process, but it appears to go a long way in the right direction and it looks like it's gaining some real support.

There is a PPU available. http://www.ageia.com/ . The problem is that you have to use a specific physics engine in the game to utilize it. And the problem with that is that no company wants to be forced to use a specific physics engine in their game. Some make their own. When this card came out, many games actually ran slower because the physics card was trying to take over and wasn't working well with the physics engine the game was using. On the other hand, the games that did run the right physics engine ran about the same with a small margin of improvement. If the card could be like a video card and be somewhat programable (per pixel shading) by each physics engine utilizing it, it would be much more useful.

I would argue that it's a bit more than a graphics upgrade, especially on the part of the PS3. The Cell architecture will allow much more advanced AI and physics, among other things. This has the potential, if the developers take advantage of it appropriately, to really make some new offerings in gaming. We're seeing PCs take the same path with the introduction of the Physx physics card and a dedicated AI chip. The other big step is pure processing power harvested as the ability to present many more entities on screen. Look at Assassin's Creed or Dead Rising as games that have started to use crowd effects to great advantage.

Ageia made a card that does nothing but physics acceleration (http://www.ageia.com/physx/index.html). I've heard rumours they plan on doing the same for AI. Buying their accelerators is pretty expensive, but it would probably be cheaper then buying 8 cores instead of 4 to increase the realism of games.

Hello specialized Physics processors:

see: http://www.ageia.com/

...and to offload physics and AI to the CPU.

I thought the next cool thing was to offload the physics to a dedicated physics processor so that you'll have more cpu cycles for better AI. Heck, it says so on Ageia's frontpage! "The next big thing to hit PC gaming." :)

For people wondering about this one, there was a story a few weeks back, which linked to a page of games supporting a new Physics processor, one of them appeared to be a chess game.

I just looked on the new page, and it seems to have disappeared.

Ironically called "Cell Factor".

Oh, and while you're right about AGP, you're wrong about physics on the PS3, as a sibling poster points out. GPU physics does not necessarily require CPU readback. Both platforms will have impressive physics middleware, PS3's RSX is quite capable of physics calculation, and Cell is in many ways more suited to it than the 360's CPU.

You may want to look at the CellFactor demo on Ageia's website before you give up on what the PhysX can offer... (also have a look at the tech demos, they're 'rather nice' - flowing liquids & bending metal.)

You may want to look at the CellFactor demo on Ageia's website before you give up on what the PhysX can offer... (also have a look at the tech demos, they're 'rather nice' - flowing liquids & bending metal.)

They seem to think so, but then again they have an interest in selling fixed-purpose processors.

On the other hand, graphics cards make sense for consumers because there are only two graphics APIs, OpenGL and DirectX, and they offer very similar functionality under the hood (but significantly different high-level APIs). So a graphics card can accelerate games written with either OpenGL or DirectX, but that's not the case with the emerging PPU field. In graphics, the APIs developed and converged on common functionality long before hardware acceleration was available at the consumer level, but I don't think the physics API situation is stable or mature enough to warrant dedicated hardware add-in cards at this time.

However, I think there are two possible scenarios that could change this.

1) Havok and Ageia could create open or closed physics API specifications and make them available to chip manufacturers, e.g. ATI and NVIDIA, which have the market penetration and manufacturing capability to make PPUs widely available. I could imagine a high-end PCIe card that had both a GPU and a PPU on-board.

2) Microsoft. Think what you will about them, but DirectX has greatly influenced the game industry and is the de-facto standard low-level API (although there are notable exceptions, such as id). Microsoft could introduce a new component of DirectX which specifies a physics API that could then be implemented in hardware.

But unless one of those things happens, I don't think proprietary PPUs are going to make a lot of sense for consumers.

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

Check out this link: http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html

Go to the section that says "I'm old enough" with the Cellfactor video and take a look at the flash movie. Although Cellfactors almost could be a poster child game of mother of all physics engines. It looks like it puts Half Life 2 to shame. (Although I wonder if you character has that much physic power to fly through the air and throw jeeps at people then why bother with having a gun?)

I really dig the blood particle effets as someone is gibbed while standing on the ledge and the blood just splashes down the side of the platform.

And you can really tell the difference in particle debris in the comparison videos at the top. However, I wonder if the same effect can be acheived with cranking up your settings on a high end gaming rig without the card. I'd wait til some 3rd party hardware review site gives the final verdict.

That'd be Ageia, not AGIA

Actually, it could run just fine on a desktop computer with PhysX

Your not:

http://physx.ageia.com/titles.html

"Warhammer MMORPG"

Its got the MMORPG part, but if you want the magical part you want:

http://www.mightandmagic.com/us/darkmessiah/teaser /

FPSRPG Might and Magic game powered by an enhanced version of source, anyone?

A ludicrous speed general purpose CPU will still suck at massively parallel computations compared to special-purpose ICs like GPUs.

The vast majority of CPU-intensive work in games like Half-Life 2 and Battlefield 2 involves massively parallelisable operations to check geometric and physical constraints, compute bezier curves, and so forth. This is why Ageia is developing a masively parallel Physics Processor that might be more beneficial to gaming performance than tripling the core speed of your CPU.

The idea is to optimize for the common case. If your CPU spends 80% of its time doing physics calculations when you play games like HL2, then making the physics calculations 10 times faster is better than making everything 3 times faster.

Maybe that will change, but if the GPU can do the work, why invest in a separate piece of hardware?

Someone hasn't heard of Ageia...

You're not the first one to think of that. Of course this is the old cycle of reincarnation rearing its ugly head again. Sadly, I don't think the PhysX card will be that great of a success unless a LOT of game developers get on board. It's just rather expensive for what it offers and adds yet another layer of complexity to a system that can already be hard to get running correctly.

Don't forget that http://www.ageia.com/ is already doing this, and set to ship their cards sometime this year hopefully. Of course the significant difference between the two is that you would only have to buy one card for the SLI solution.

The more interesting processor to do this with would be this:
http://www.ageia.com/technology.html
Graphics card do certain types of mathematical equations very well. The physics PPU specializes in more complex processing.

Ageia is one company. I saw their demo system at Quakecon. Seems pretty neat but I'm skeptical about a long term market for them.

real time ray tracing isn't too far away

It's already here. There was this article about real time ray tracing hardware a while back. And there was this one about physics processing units. It will be interesting to see these things implemented together.

It's also AGEIA not AEGIA.

Given I don't have mod points, I'll actually have to write an response. Grumble...

Definitely agree, though. I don't see CPU time as a significant issue for games, any more. Okay, developers might have to write code a little more carefully than they do on the PC, and maybe they'll have to actually multi-thread their stuff properly to get decent performance, but I don't think they'll actually hit CPU limitation issues.

Physics might be an issue, but maybe Ageia have the right idea, with their dedicated physics processor. From I've heard about their chip, it's a major leap over CPU based physics, much like 3D graphics chips were are major leap over CPU based 3D graphics when they first came out.

This leaves us with AI; unless I'm wrong, that's not going to take much CPU time. Maybe if you had a _lot_ of computer controlled chars, I suppose, but otherwise... ?

With people having access to several cores for handling computation, there are still some who would think we need a Physics Card. Wouldn't you hate it to know that you have 4 cores on a system, and yet your system is only using one because someone thought we needed proprietary cards for everything.

Hardware-accelerated physics is in the works.

"Theres a major lackage of a physics processor right now."

Actually, there is a PPU (Physics Processing Unit) now. Not really mainstream, but these guys have one, plus are competition to the Havok physics engine.

Their engine is supposed to be used in UT2007 and is, from the UT devs reports, pretty impressive.

In the SDK Documentation PDF on their site (available from http://www.ageia.com/novodex_downloads.html) section 5.2.9 on page 33 mentions the solver used. Does anyone know if the solver is an n-th order Runge-Kutta method, or do they simply subdivide each step into n euler steps?

...right here. It doesn't really say anything, though - just a few pages that recap physics usage in games, and then a paragraph about how they're going to change all that, etc.

Didn't white papers use to be heavy on technical content? Now it seems that "white paper" just means "nicely formatted eight page PDF advertisement"....