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World's First Physics Processing Unit
Duane writes "Gamers Depot has an exclusive interview with the team behind Ageia - the maker of the world's first Physics Processing Unit (PPU) - which was just announced today.
"Sure we've all heard about the CPU and GPU - that's old hat by now and as most hardware reviewers will tell you, it's about time we got something that's truly revolutionary. Yeah, Pixel shaders are cool, and can do a lot of really nice things; however, pale in comparison in scope to what the PhysX chip from Ageia has the potential to bring to gaming.""
...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"....
The Army reading list
I wouldn't be surprised if the next Kernel revision supported it... might even be ready before Windows is :P
what do you mean "port"? This is hardware...not software.
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Note that no-where in the press release does it say that this is a shipping product. Before you get all excited about the promise of this product, realize that this chip may never see the light of day. A press release does not a product make, regardless of how cool the product might be.
Get ready for another *phucked* patent. The CPU in a computer is *VERY* capable of doing simulations. Someone explain to me why I need to purchase a *slower* processor with less ram to do it for me? The money would always be better spent on a faster processor...
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
...but coincidentally the 1,000,000,000th computer accessory that will be a complete failure in the market.
I also wonder how it compares to the Cell processor's dedicated units.
For a console, sounds like someone could really steal a march on the rest of them...
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not really.
:)
You could have said the exact same thing about graphics with the advent of hardware 3D accelerators, yet games certainly haven't all ended up looking the same. If anything they're able to look *more* varied now thanks to the extra power allowing neat tricks like cell shading and real time effects.
In the same way GPUs (initially, at least) sped up all the graphics things that all 3D games have in common (triangles, texturing, lighting, etc), this will presumably speed up all the physics things all games have in common (collisions, velocities, etc)
That doesn't necessarily mean they all have to act the same. As a programmer you still get to determine exactly what happens when something collides, or how it behaves when it's crushed. It's just that you have access to much more power, and in the same way that gets us neat tricks on GPUs I think we'd see the same with these PPUs.
The important thing is that this takes care of all the low level stuff, giving the developers more time and power to spend on the higher level areas where they can really be creative.
Incidentally, am I the only one here saying "about time" with this? I had this idea the moment I saw the first Voodoo card. I'd have done something with it, but I figured it was so damn obvious everyone else would've thought of it too. That, and I'm just plain lazy
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
So far I feel this is stupid current for a few reasons.
1) Games do not use Real Physics, they fake it. If they didn't fake it, you wouldn't want to play it.
2) Processors are currently faster then what programs can use(If programmed correctly). It is going to take a few years before games keep up with Processors.
3) Why not just have two general purpose processors. Multithreading is getting pretty common. What would the added advantage between having a seperate processor just for Physics,then having two general usage processors?
Things could change in the comming years, but right now, or in the future I dont think something like this is needed.
mnewberg.com
Unless they can make a deal with ATI or NVidia and have their PPU work with a GPU, it will be a very difficult thing to sell to people. They also need to get Direct X support and maybe have it work transparently with it (if that is possible). I can see this being a part of a video card, not a standalone PCI card unless the results are incredible and can be shown as a huge benefit to gaming, othewise only the hardcore framerate junkies will buy it.
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that a holodeck-like experience does seem to be what both gamers and developers have set up in their minds as the "holy grail" of video games. I think in the near future, we're going to see real innovation in physics engines to use ray-tracing-like lighting affects and real particle collisions instead of the pre-programmed tricks used today. I think for the transition we're in for, it probably would be appropriate to compare the transition to the sort of change we saw between the fake 3D of Duke Nukem 3D to the [more] real 3D of Quake.
However, what remains to be seen is whether those games will be more fun.
Reading the results of the "PPU" is going to be the stumbling block. Graphics accelerators work because you compose the geometry then send it off to the other processor, and from then on you don't worry about the data. You don't have to worry about reading anything back.
I assume having a seperate "physics processor" will mean the app has to send the data off to be processed (say, a couple thousand points to collision-detect against a couple thousand planes), but then your app needs to read the results back across the bus! Is the time saved off-loading these computations going to be worth all this IO?
Normal cpu's already have pretty good fpu units, which are very fast for scalar code. Also, we have things like SSE2/Altivec for vectorizable code. And then there's things like gpgpu.org looking at using the massively parallel fpu capacity of modern gpu's for general purpose physics calculations (linear algebra), i.e. vector processing on a budget.
So where does this thing fit in? As expected, the "article" was nothing more than a thinly veiled marketing blurb, so no info there. Personally, I find it hard to believe that the PPU is competetive with FPU's and GPGPU for general purpose FP calculations. That leaves a chip optimized for certain operations, a bit like MDGRAPE. Or what am I missing?
No saves is the biggest downside.
Today's kids have measureably less creative skills than in the past, because corporate america is doing an ever better job of shrink wrapping imagination.
Back in the day, there were Lincoln Logs, Erector Sets, Legos, and many other toys that had an inherent creative context. Legos are still around, but the most popular kits now have some kind of licensing tie-in.
In fact, the most popular toys for most of the last 20 years have been licensed. In the last few years, witness the Pokemon and Spongebob crazes.
Video games are most directly damaging to a child's imagination, because now the child doesn't have to imagine anything. Their mind's eye is transplanted onto a screen. Not to mention that video games today have increasingly less replay value, having become more like interactive scripts and requiring less and less problem solving. If the hero dies, go back to the last save point and try again. Video games have been sacrificing game play for more visual, aural, and physical believability.
Today's kids have computers to think for them, tomorrow's kids will have computers to imagine for them.In other words, developers could keep trying to innovate on the Super-Mario-type games, but gamers and developers seem more focused on creating more realistic first-person-shooter war simulations. (Not that I'm criticizing)
Try playing console games and you'll see things shifted much more the other way. It just comes down to First Person Shooter games play much better with a keyboard and mouse than with a controller, whereas a classic Nintendo style game needs a fairly well defined controller to play well, and would absolutely suck with a keyboard or mouse.
PC gaming is driven by the keyboard and mouse. Controllers are available, but not very common, and even more importantly, not at all standardized. So developers mainly stick to games that work well with the keyboard and mouse (FPS, RTS, RPG).
There really should be a -1: Unfunny mod.