Slashdot Mirror
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.""
All I know is that I want to throw the dead hooker down the stairs and have her head split open... or whatever that anti-violent game ad says I can do.
It won't be /. worthy news until the first Linux port is up and running on it!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Nerds around the world rejoice!
Go outside.
...that my suspcions were correct. All this 3D stuff with pixels and texels and blah blah blah is just test runs before we create physical augmentation with nanotech replacing pixels and texels. (Wow that was one sentence!) Holodeck anyone? ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...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
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.
PPU: Pr0n Processing Unit.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
And I thought Slashdot "editors" had poor grammar skills! Damn. I guess they're starting to farm the technical report writing and gaming reviews to India now too!
I just finished reading the article, and this actually has some potential.
The biggest problem they're going to have to deal with, and granted, I'm not a game developer so someone can feel free to fill in the details, is that I would believe that most developers have their own method for dealing with physics - from simple collision to ragdoll and the like. The idea is "How do I tell the computer these things are touching each other' (like bullets - these are "instant shot", so the developer just says "if there's a straight line between the direction the Player A is facing, and if that line would intersect Player B, then it's a hit. If not, then miss." And algorithms like that are done by matrixes, if I'm not mistaken. Other "hits" deal with actual objects (rockets moving, goops from the goop gun, etc).
But the difference between Quake III and Unreal Tournament is more than just 'draw the graphics", it's also in how each engine deals with how those collisions are managed.
So with a PPU, you have to decide on a common library of collisions. Good news: more objects you can play with and let the PPU decide what's getting hit. Bad news: everybody's game will react basically the same and they'll have to decide if that's a good idea.
Either way, I'll wait a year or so and see what happens. Best of luck to the developers - looks like they're at least shooting for something unique.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
This includes things such as Rigid Body Dynamics, Collision Detection, Fluid Simulation, Soft Bodies and Fracturing of objects.
This will be useful for all those pr0n sites out there!
Attention all planets of the Solar Federation! We have assumed control! - Neil Peart
If this thing can do physics homework, I'm getting two.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
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...
Yeah, just look how a 3.7GHz P4 with an intergrated graphics chipset outperforms a 2.4GHz P4 with a high end $500 graphics card.
Oh wait... it doesn't.
Considering that most games routinely defy the laws of physics, I would think that such a processor would actually make the games more dull.
Proverbs 21:19
Someone explain to me why I need to purchase a *slower* processor with less ram to do it for me?
For the same reason people purchase graphics cards with slower clock speeds and less RAM to compliment their blazing fast processors. As the article explains, the CPU is a general purpose chip. A PPU will be fully dedicated to physics, and therefore likely far more efficient. By your logic, all processes in the machine should be handled by a single chip, which while elegant, is probably not the most efficient solution. I predict we will see more specific-purpose chips being developed, not fewer.
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.
I'm not wrong. You haven't thought about it hard enough.
Pictures of boards are all well and good, and the martketing hype is fun, but we need to know.
Stick Men
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.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
Your video card's GPU runs at a slower clock rate than the CPU, but because its pipelines are completely optimized for T&L and triangle filling, it can do those tasks faster than your CPU ever could. Likewise, a physics processor is optimized for simulating the dynamics of a mechanical system.
Upgrades to continue as long as we continue to gain knowledge and make new discoveries. Can't guarantee a ship date though. With the Hiesenberg UP module the enemy can't do anything until sighted, detected or measured. Stand still, close your eyes, shoot, winner everytime.
1) Games do not use Real Physics, they fake it. If they didn't fake it, you wouldn't want to play it.
Games also do not use Real Graphics (whatever that would be. Raytracing, presumably) - instead they fake it. And yet they still benefit a hell of a lot from GPU cards.
This card does not force physics to be realistic - there's nothing stopping a developer making cars that go at 600 MPH, or having characters leap a tall building in a single bound. It just enables things like that to be done much easier, and more convincingly.
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.
Only because of your GPU. Go on, take that baby out of there and fire up Doom 3. Whoops! Where'd your framerate go?
The reason most games fly on current hardware is because they offload most of the work to the GPU. The major tasks outside of graphics are physics and AI - and the physics are getting increasingly more complex as games become more realistic.
Those lovely flying ragdoll bodies have to be calculated somewhere, y'know.
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?
Again, the same could be said about a GPU. This does bring up an interesting point, however. If this takes off it won't be long before you have a GPU, soundcard (with hardware 3D audio), PPU, probably some kind of AI hardware card...
how long before someone goes "Hey! I know! Why don't we combine all these things into a generic processor.. I know.. we could call it a.. uh.. CPU!"
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
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?
I can see it now:
PPU Emulates Grand Unified Theory. Physicists surrender.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
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?
We've already pushed off sound, graphics, and now physics onto seperate processors. Why not just craft an entire game console onto a single card and be done with it? Jeesh.