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.""

Comments

Here's why it matters

[Deep Fried Geekboy]

If you have a game like Unreal Tournament 2004, it is the physics processing that really kills your framerate, no matter how good your GPU. You can see this by simply swapping between the Deathmatch and Onslaught gametypes. The Onslaught world is filled with vehicles which run off the Karma physics engine, and they KILL your framerate, so that the game effectively becomes CPU-throttled, instead of GPU-throttled (which is what we are used to). A PPU is a genuinely brilliant idea, and relatively easy to implement. It will be interesting to see what the programming interface is... and whether the board runs an engine like Karma or something they've invented all for themselves. Prepare to be amazed, I think.

Re:Here's why it matters

[clutch110]

Here is a link to an Epic developer talking about how the Unreal 3 engine will use this PPU.

Very interesting technology, comes with its own SDK and should be able to handle many times the amount of physics based objects in a game than the CPU can handle now.

Excellent, fascinating, BUT....

[TomorrowPlusX]

I'm not a professional developer... that said I'm developing both a robotic simulation API/framework and a game, both in my free time, both *heavily* use the open dynamics engine for physics.

The Open Dynamics Engine is free, & open source. It's not the best physics engine, by any margin. However, being open source I can afford it... and most importantly I can use it on my Mac ( hell, I actually provided some patches to get it to correctly use single-precision trig when OS X.3 came out ). Plus, I want to release my game and robot simulator under an open source license... can't expect people to *buy* novodex or havok just to build the apps.

This PPU looks like a *wonderful* thing, but reading their site, and the interview, it sounds like to use it you've got to use Novodex. That said, Novodex is awesome -- and many games use Novodex already for physics.

(Perhaps I missed something, maybe Novodex is just an API wrapper. Maybe they'll have a low-level API which you can bind to as you want. )

But the thing is, I'd like to be able to buy one of these boards and *not* have to shell out for a developer license for an API which isn't even available on Mac ( maybe it is ). Also, both my simulator and game are intended to be released under an open source license at some point. So, no novodex for me. So, no PPU for me.

Perhaps we're just a little short on data at the moment.

Re:Putting everything on seperate units

[Surt]

A game console doesn't have one of these (yet), nor are even the next generation likely to.

What this is suggesting is rather that games are for the most part not general purpose tasks, and that as a result general purpose cpus can be grossly outperformed by special purpose cpus. Once you reach that notion, then you just have to decide what the set of special purpose cpus you need are. It's a repeating process where parallelizable areas of the codebase are identified, and special purpose cpus are crafted to handle them, so that the performance limiting area of code keeps moving to some task for which the special purpose chip hasn't yet been built.

For quite some time the graphics capabilities of the GPUs has been the limiting factor in effectively conveying the game designer's intended experience. We're now reaching the point where the GPUs are so effective that what now looks 'wrong' has more to do with physics simulation than with graphic rendering. (Though I'll still say that there are 3 or 4 generations of graphics improvements yet to come that will still have a significant effect, it's just that now it has reached the point where it is no longer clear that more GPU improvements will have the _largest_ effect on perceived quality.)