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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.""
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.
Nerds around the world rejoice!
Go outside.
...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
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
Actually, it won't be /. worthy news until it is posted, reposted, and reposted again - all in the same day.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
This matters at the physics level. If you are going to fully implement the ballistics you are going to have implement the motion of the bullet, the atmospheric drag on the bullet, the gyroscopic stabilization, the effect of gravity on the bullet ("bullet drop") not to mention the effects of the individual specifications of the bullet itself, and perhaps some entirely random factors (the world isn't perfect).
And if you are implementing a game where players can fire an assault rifle full-automatic (600-700 rounds a minute or more, depending on too many factors to list - which might need to be implemented and calcuated by the computer, of course...) you can see that the CPU is going to start needing some help to work it out.
And that's just the bullets.
The gun example is just an example of the sort of jobs a co-processor might be required to do in an FPS environment. To cut a long story short, if you are going to be simulating life, even a small approximation of life, accurately, you are going to need to be calculating an awful lot of physics.
Never. We will never surrender. We will fight them at the CERN labs, we will fight them at the Black Mesa, we will fight them at the Gallium Neutrino Observatory, we will fight them and we will win !
It's not over until the Higgs boson sings !
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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.)
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking