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NVIDIA Launches New SLI Physics Technology
Thomas Hines writes "NVIDIA just launched a new SLI Physics technology. It offloads the physics processing from the CPU to the graphics card. According to the benchmark, it improves the frame rate by more than 10x. Certainly worth investing in SLI if it works."
Sounds like an ATI-killer to me! What ever happened to the hype about dedicated physics chips?
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
This is a little misleading. The hardware is really just fast at computing, not specifically designed for "physics". For example it doesn't have a build in ODE solver.
This physics system is used for visual physics (i.e., realistic graphical effects), not gameplay physics, which are still done on the CPU.
Therefore you get a 10x framerate increase over running massively intensive effects on the CPU.
This is good, because games will look nicer. But if you don't have the GPU grunt, you can simply disable (or cut them down) them in game - it won't affect the gameplay.
Why does this require SLI? You can do stream processing on most relatively-modern accelerated 3d video cards.
This will be critically important as programs start to push particle and geometry modeling. I remember back when I had my Quadra 840av in 1993, I popped a couple of Wizard 3dfx Voodoo cards in it when they first started supporting SLI and the performance benefits were noticeable. Of course we were all hoping for the performance to continue to scale, but 3Dfx started getting interested in other markets including defense and then were bought by Nvidia making me wonder if SLI would ever really take off. It's nice to see that the technology is still around and flourishing.
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How does this work in relation to AMD's consideration of a physics coprocessor or another specialized processor? It seems like that solution is superior.
I've been waiting for this for a while. It's the obvious next step in GPU design. I have a feeling GPUs are going to become more and more general, and eventually accelerate the majority of inherently parallel processes, while the CPU executes everything else. We don't even have to change the acronym. Just call it a "Generic Processing Unit"...
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Of course its nothing more than a press release but there are numerous questions it raises:
1) What limitations are there on calculations. A GPU is not as general as a cpu and it would probably suck when dealing with branches especially when they aren't independant.
2) How much faster could this actually be. Is it simply a matter of looking to the future? (ie: we can already run with Aniso and AA and high resolutions so 5 years from now they'll be "overpowered"). IMO the next logical step is full fledged HDR and then more polygons.
3) What is exactly expected of these. General physics shouldn't be, but i can understand if they do small effects here or there.
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I don't think this is a general physics processor. It seems to be aimed at "eyecandy" physics calculations - mostly particle systems - whose results don't need to feed back into application logic. Which makes sense, given than GPU->CPU readbacks are a notorious perfomance killer.
Potentially shiny, but not really revolutionary or new. People have been doing particle system updates with shaders for a while now.
The "technology" is specifically designed for physics. The hardware is not, but the driver, API, and havok engine enhancements are. This is therefore "physics technology".
Besides, I rather think this is what nVidia had in mind when they first started making SLI boards. It was always obvious that the rendering benefit from SLI wasn't going to be cost-effective. Turning their boards into general purpose game accelerators has probably been in their thoughts for a while.
www.gpgpu.org
This neither requires SLI nor is it limited to NVIDIA chips. NVIDIA is just launching it publicly. ATI will be showing it off behind closed doors this week.
10x faster? They might as well just say it's infinity times faster so that we know they are bullshitting from the second we read it...
By offloading physics from the CPU to the graphics card, this improves frame rates?
Why would I waste precious GPU processing to process Physics? I mean, all the CPU does these days is handle AI, physics, and texture loading. If you offload physics to the GPU, then the CPU is doing less and your swamping the GPU with more work.
If it does increase frame rates, then I would suggest why not improve graphics rendering rather then physics processing. I find that for all the advances nVidia and ATI have made over the years, 3D gaming visual quality is still inferior to cinematic quality 3D rendering. I mean, playing F.E.A.R, a relatively new game on the market, with ALL the settings to maximum, while I get 12 FPS the image quality just isn't that great on a current generation card.
I would prefer if nVidia and ATI actually focused on bringing cinematic quality 3D rendering to gaming, instead of just claiming they do. I want smooth high-poly models with realistic lighting and 60fps. I could care less about a game running at 120fps that looks bad. All 3D games suffer from a kind of mundane pseudo style of 3D modeling that leaves relatively well designed models playing in big rectangles with high-res texture cheats. Give me more lushes organic environments. Bring nurbs into the mix by creating actual curved surfaces into real time 3D rendering instead of just lots of triangles mimicking a curved surface.
So, while nVidia may have its heart in the right place, the last thing people need is their GPU being taxed with physics processing. Isn't there supposed to be a physics add-on card entering the market soon anyways? Won't multi-core CPU's offer better physics performance then a single GPU? Instead of trying to compete against add-in cards and multi-core CPU's, nVidia should just focus on improving 3D rendering quality and actually start delivering on their promises of offering cinematic 3D rendering to each new generation of video card they hype about.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.
Why not have a complete physics card? It would be a nice use for that PCI express bus which only has video cards as an option right now. That way you could just buy the physics card, without having to upgrade the video card. Although this is all kind of weird. Start offloading everything off to specialized cards, you pretty much have a multiple CPU machine, where each CPU is specially tuned to do a specific type of processing. Might be the leap necessary to maintain Moore's law.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The one linked is a little bland for my taste
h ysics/
r g.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial_s&hl=en&percentage_se rved=100&tab=wn&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=NVIDIA+SLI+Physics &btnG=Search+News
this one is better:
http://www.tgdaily.com/2006/03/20/nvidia_sli_forp
Or choose you own adventure via Google news:
http://news.google.ca/news?client=firefox-a&rls=o
Of course, the basic isn't exactly brand new -- some of us have been writing shaders to handle heavy duty math for a while. The difference is that up until now, most real support for this has been more or less experimental (e.g. the Brook system for doing numeric processing on GPUs. Brook is also sufficiently different from an average programming language that it's probably fairly difficult to put to use in quite a few situations.
Having a physics-oriented framework will probably make this capability quite a bit easier to apply in quite a few more situations, which is clearly a good thing (especially for nVidia and perhaps ATI, of course).
The part I find interesting is that Intel has taken a big part of the low-end graphics market. Now nVidia is working at taking more of the computing high-end market. I can see it now: a game that does all the computing on a couple of big nVidia chips, and then displays the results via Intel integrated graphics...
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
While I agree that it will improve performance substantially, I fear that it will make games and 3D applications very video-card dependant. If nVidia's physics are slightly different than ATI's future implementation, then I think it will open up a world of new problems.
I wonder if these cards could be useful for for Numerical computation? I could use extra cpu power for solving a linear system.
So you are scarificing Visual Quality for framerate and physics. Why not buy a dedicated physics card and get the best of both?
From a consumer stand point, not many people are going to spend $600 to $1000 to get 2 video cards that can do really spiffy graphics. Its a very niche market which means no game company is going to spend an extra few months developing eye candy for a graphics card that a very small population uses. More likely we'll see ATI come out with a competing product that won't be so expensive and will attract more buyers.
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Applications should be built to be more efficient, to handle modern hardware, instead of simply relying on consumers purchasing faster hardware.
I've used GPU for parallel processing of CPU heavy data in the past. You can use it for anything computationally heavy.
In my case, I've used it for stereoscopic image analysis in realtime. The best part about it is that you can add GPUs to a single box.
I don't know, but I would suspect that some of the bigger animation shops use multiple GPUs in a single machine for their rendering operations.
now the GFX card processes all the gaming and the CPU is only responsible for launching and saving your games? well.. they should call it the NVidia gaming system on a board.
A company called Ageia is making a physics processing card that will handle physics calculations. It will be supported by City of Heroes/Villains when it is available.
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Sorry, hard to take someone serious when they use evil like that, espicially in regards to hardware.
I know the hacker jargon use of evil, but this is really over used.
OTOH, it's Theo, and he likes to hear himself talk.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
from the article:
...so, while yes, an SLI setup would be recommended for such intensive computation, it's not necessary. Older cards like the 6800GT should be able to handle it fine.
"Currently, the new Havok FX engine will support SLI physics even for a single NVIDIA GPU. But NVIDIA states that an SLI configuration is still the preferred mode since it allows the second GPU to be dedicated for effects physics processing."
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
you cant invest in anything but realestate and stocks.
Anything else is an expense and liability.
Anyone "investing" in a video card is a moron. Someone expensing for a video card is smart.
Like these idiots that call a car or jewelery an "investment". They are not.
1. BSD is even less ready for the desktop than Linux so who cares about BSD security and modern video cards?
2. BSD is great on a server. Servers don't require video cards at all. Often they use wimpy on board video if they need any video at all.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Real-time cinematic quality graphics rendering = HARD.
Physics acceleration that allows for rather impressive collisions and water: MUCH EASIER.
Maximum output for minimum input. Having physics acceleration in the GPU makes sense as you don't have to buy an extra accelerator card.
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
Mmmm ....
...And what do we need that old x86, (dual, quad, whatever) for? Refresh my memory will ya?
... Long live C/C++/Java multiprocessor extensions!
.smm.
I thought that's what the IBM/Sony/Toshiba's cell broadband processor was supposed to do in the PS3? Oh well....
Long live multicore and/or multiprocessor technologies!!!! But mercy on the po' programmers though
Time for a paradigm shift.
OK, I'm done.
My gaming rig has an FX-55 to do all of that physics number crunching--and it does quite a good job of it, too.
Maybe the most hardcore PC gamers or professionals out there could use a PPU so they can get the absolute most out of their hardware. For everybody else, it's just the latest "cool thing," and I really hope it doens't catch on.
All your points are certainly valid, but I'd say the next era of physics in games is just around the corner. Go watch the spore video to see an example of what's coming.
:)
Besides, who doesn't like rag dolling? I played through HL2 just so I could toss bodies around with the gravity gun.
I can't read the article since it's slashdotted, but here's what I want to know:
First, what physics API are they using? This is, after all, a little like OpenGL vs DirectX. You need a physics API to do this stuff, and there are out there a *lot* of portable and high quality APIs. Havok, Newton, Aegeia (spelling?), and the open source ODE ( which I use ). The APIs aren't interchangeable, and aren't necessarily free.
Second, at least when I'm doing this work, there's a *lot* of back and forth between the physics and my game engine. Maybe not a whole lot of data, but a lot of callbacks -- a lot of situations where the collision system determines A & B are about to touch and has to ask my code what to do about it. And my code has to do some hairy stuff to forward these events to A & B ( since physics engines have their own idea of what a physical object instance is, and it's orthogonal to my game objects, so I have to have some container and void ptr mojo ) and so on and so forth. If all this is running on the GPU, sure the math may be fast but I worry about all the stalls resulting from the back and forth. Sure, that can be parallelized and the callbacks can be queued, but still.
Anyway, I want info, not marketing.
Oh christ, and finally, I work on a Mac. When will I see support? ( lol. this is me falling off my chair, crying and laughing, crying... sobbing. Because I know the answer ). Can we at least assume/hope that they'll provide a software fallback api, and that that api will be available for linux and mac? After all, NVIDIA has linux and mac ports of Cg, so why not this? I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
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If you read the article it mentions that this also works on single GPU platforms.
How does stacking processors affect Moore's law? That doesn't increase IC complexity, otherwise we might as well claim we've far surpassed Moore's law because Livermore's BlueGene install has 6.8 trillion transistors...
Microsoft has also announced a new server technology that unloads all calls from Slashdot to a seperate system avoiding the dreaded "Slashdotting" effect.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Non-root, user-level access to IO ports (by authorized programs) is not evil; it's what allows non-kernel level display servers. It keeps some really complicated stuff out of the kernel, thus improving system stability.
"..improves the frame rate by more than 10x"
Liars end up in Hell.
Will code a sig generator for food
This is definitely not new news at all. The general-purpose graphics processing unit community has been active for quite some time, see gpgpu.org. I think Nvidia may be using this to just push their quad-gpu / SLI setup as it would be pretty hard for the main cpu to keep all of those gpu's busy 100% of the time. By offloading physics, and numeric solvers, etc, you can do some interesting things. Think of textures as your inputs, and render-targets as your feedback from the gpu. However, this is not new, as many of you have pointed out already.
What ever happened to the hype about dedicated physics chips?
The original article appears to be slashdotted.
So could somebody tell me how wide the floats are in this "SLI" engine? [I don't even know what "SLI" stands for.]
AFAIK, nVidia [like IBM/Sony "cell"] uses only 32-bit single-precision floats [and, as bad as that is, ATi uses only 24-bit "three-quarters"-precision floats].
What math/physics/chemistry/engineering types need is as much precision as possible - preferably 128 bits.
Why? Because the stuff they are modelling tends to be highly non-linear and the calculations tend to be highly unstable.
32-bits isn't even enough to give integer granularity up to 16 million:
.....that makes games fun to play?
As I understand it the "physics" being modeled here is not the trajectory of the incoming rocket to determine if it hits you. It is the trajectories of the flames leaping forth as the rocket explodes; it's still just graphics processing. It is better for the CPU to describe things at an abstract level, then forget about it and let a dedicated processor project that into space and figure out how lights bounces off it, etc. Currently, these abstract descriptions are mostly in the form of sets of polygons. But some cool effects we want to turn into pixels on the screen are not most nicely described by sets of polys.
With this, the CPU can say there are 50 little flame bits moving outward from such and such a point, with such and such properties; and the GPU can handle turning those abstract descriptions into pixels on the screen, just as it always has. Now it just has an additional type of absract description it can support.
"I would prefer if nVidia and ATI actually focused on bringing cinematic quality 3D rendering to gaming, instead of just claiming they do"
And this is one part of their continuing attempt to do that; of course, "cinematic" quality is what you get when you spend as much time as you feel like rendering each frame, so for game renderes to catch it, rendering will have to get so good that there is just no improvement to be made by rendering for more than 1/60 th of a second. Might be a while.
DirectX 10 will make it a combined 60 to 80 times faster
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
Everyone likes to pull out the "Toy Story in realtime" comment, but if you look at an XBox 360 game, you're more or less there. The anti-aliasing isn't quite as good because it isn't rendered at movie resolutions, but everything else is in place.
Go back and actually watch Toy Story and you'll be surprised. In any case, we can *definitely* match T2, The Abyss... outpace Tron by many miles. What we can't match now is The Incredibles.
Of course, the art direction on games isn't Pixar quality. Choppy models that aren't designed for readability, weird textures, overtexturing... Lots of stuff. Nintendo's a lot better about this. You don't look at a Nintendo game and say "You know, this would be a lot better if the CPU were just faster." The graphics are what they are.
BF2 for example. This game is ALL physics... I love it personally, and one of the coolest (and crappy) things is when you get shelled by artillary 500 yards into the air. Your limbs are flying everywhere and the FPS decrease is noticeable when there are 10 or so soliders all ragdolled in the air (i'm sure particles have a lot to do with this also, but IAN a FPS programmer). FEAR is another great example. This is just the turning point in realism for FPS games, and that is very cool IMHO.
For a game, the best way to solve ODEs is numerically. Since you don't need the precision of the exact solution, the solutions are considerably simpler computationally once you've linearized them. Doing RK4 on the fly is precisely the best solution to the problem. Well, depending on the stiffness.. but you can always fall back on plain ol' trapezoid rule if you just wanna know, "what does the thing do until it hits the ground" to enough precision to be pretty.
solving a linearized ODE is just plain ol' ordinary matrix math, very parallelizeable and a lot less computationally expensive than breaking up a transcendental function into piecewise conitinuous steps and calculating the result every time.
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The guys over at http://www.gpgpu.org/ have been doing various math calculations, including 'physics' on GPUs for a while now. One big problem is that the only real API is OpenGL. So not only do you have to be a smart math programmer (which is pretty rare to begin with) but you also have to understand graphics programming too and then figure out how to map traditional math operations onto the graphics operations that OpenGL makes available. It isn't that hard to do simple things like matrix math, but trying to really optimize it for really good performance requires almost wizard-level understanding of OpenGL and the underlying hardware implementation.
The cards' math capabilities would be so much more accessible (and thus used by so many more programmers) if Nvidia (and ATI) would come out with standard math-library interfaces to their cards. Give us something that looks like FFTW and has been tweaked by the card engineers for maximum performance and then we will see everbody and his brother using these video cards for math co-processing.
By the end of next week there will be a game out on the market that will require one of these cards...
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
An ASIC will always outperform a general purpose thread-based multi-core processor. We're still stuck with x86, even! Magnetic transistors offers the flexibility necessary to imagine a morphable chip that could beat the ASIC, but that's a ways off.
How about, Certainly worth investing in SLI if it works on the specific game(s) you most want to play at higher speeds and/or resolutions.
Otherwise, not worth investing in at all.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I love how all of those tech-review pictures had "Confidential - Do not distribute" on them. Oh well, NVIDIA deserves to get their crap looted, since they're stealing the entire idea as a way to undercut and steal Ageia's idea.
The (next) holy grail of games is the fully destructable environment, where damage isn't a sprite on a plane, but actual particle rearrangement of walls and buildings and such. This is a pretty strong step in that direction.
The problem is that the internal logic of games like Quake and Half-Life is that, if the environment reacts correctly with respect to the physics of weapons, any game environment will quite quickly be reduced to piles of rubble and little more. Think of the pictures of Europe in WWII, and then imagine the map after a few rounds using the BFG. All those clever hidey-holes and corner sneaking tricks become useless when the terrain is quickly reduced to vaguely hilly, rolling rubble landscapes.
There'll be some dodges, like "this weapons does radiation damage, not explosive, so that's why the gyprock walls of the apartment building aren't destroyed while everything inside is pulped," but fundamentally, we're headed for a design crisis where the only remaining plausibility will be found in historical combat sims.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The summary doesn't mention it and the article is really slow to load, but this is a joint project between Nvidia and Havok (the physics engine from Halo 2, Half-Life 2, and a bunch of other games).
There's some more information over at Gamasutra and Havok's site.
...when powered by GPUs such as NVIDIA GeForce®7 or 6 Series GPUs and further amplified with NVIDIA SLI multi-GPU technology.
When I was in school, it was mandatory to use the Full English Version (FEV) of an acronym the first time used in an essay. Is it such a unreasonble request?
Why bother? We have wikipedia to help tell us that SLI may in fact stand for "Street Light Interference, a phenomenon whereby street lights go out as you pass beneath them."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLI
Or perhaps it is "Scalable Link Interface", but that isn't half as fun.
Each time I hear that an "advance" has been made and I read that it is basically re-integrating various components back into the primary system or tying those components tighter to the CPU then I can't help but scream "AMIGA!" Of course, this leads to co-workers walking wider paths around me while having avoiding eye contact '-).
Still, all of these advances lead me to believe that we might going back to a dedicated chip style of computing BUT what I am also hoping for is a completely upgradeable system that I can pull the, say, physics processor out and plug a newer version or better chip into without having to replace the entire motherboard or daughterboard. Which, of course, leade me right back to that whole screaming scenario :) The Amiga style of computing may yet live again.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
All sorts of RDMA hardware (InfiniBand, iWarp, Myrinet, etc) allow user space access directly to hardware for performance reasons. In HPC and high databases copies and context switches are increase latency too much. IB has a nice security mechanism through the use of local and remote keys to protect memory on both sides of the wire.
-Ack
-- soldack
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now in the less than best case...this claim is bullshit.
Is it such an unreasonable request that Slashdot articles NOT be dumbed down for those too lazy to type www.google.com into their web browser and find the answer to something they don't understand?
e =off&q=Nvidia+SLI&btnG=Search
Here, I'll even help you:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=lang_en&saf
First link that gets returned.
I mean, 640K ought to be enough for everybody...
WTF does SLI have to do with this?
Surely if they can do this on two video cards, they can do it half as fast on one (framerates 5x faster are fine by me...).
Uh, that's highly unlikely. The physics of a flying body is no more difficult to compute that the physics of a running body. "Particle systems" are not the reason for the slowdown, more likely, it has to do with the fact that a player at high altitude can see a LOT of the game world and therefore more packets have to be sent in order to maintain a consistent view as the player flies through the air.
This would have been a more appropriate link, giving the anser right away.
-bZj
.sig
The physics of a flying body is no more difficult to compute that the physics of a running body.
Not true, in the sense of a FPS. You only see your weapon/HUD while running, which is essentially static most of the time. When you are blown to bits, most games switch to 3rd person, and you can see your body parts fall asunder. Definitely more intensive computing involved, along with the addition of seeing more of the field due to increase 3rd person POV.
-bZj
.sig
Don't worry! Microsoft will come to the rescue with DirectX 11... all you will have to do is write the physics engine using the DirectX API, and Microsoft's trusty software will interface with whichever hardware you have. Don't worry... it'll be bug free and secure, too!
Anything that can return more than you paid for it is potentially an investment. Cars and jewelry can both fall into that category. As could something like insurance, art or starting a company.
-bZj
.sig
I can already get Doom 3 running at ~70 fps with pretty high graphics settings - are they seriousyl trying to tell me that by adding a second video card and twaeking a little I could get 700 fps?
I'll believe it when I see it (which I won't).
It's official. Most of you are morons.
This is due to modern PC video card architecture containing a large quantity of PURE EVIL. To get around this evil the X developers have done some rather expedient things, such as directly accessing the cards via IO registers, directly from userland.
It's worse than that - even if you dispense with a graphics card, your OS still has to directly access some of your hardware at some point. This creates the opportunity for all kinds of strange interactions and unforseen security holes.
Ever at the forefront of proactive security, the OpenBSD team have announced their solution to this problem. OpenBSD 4.0 will be the first OS to not run on any hardware at all. It will exist only as a mass of finely crafted and provably secure pseudo code. Although critics have pointed out that the finished product may lack something in the functionality stakes, supporters have pointed out that the OS has been moving in this direction for a while.
Project leader Theo offered the following comment, "Retards! You weren't supposed to install it anyway! Have you read the chapter on partitioning in the install guide? Do you really think we wrote it like that because we wanted people to try and install it? Jesus, you make me sick."
Didn't a company called Ageia (?) design a PCI-express addon (or PCIx or wtv) that was basically a separate chip completely dedicated to physics calculations (ragdoll thingies and that sort of stuff)?
In fact, wasn't the PS3 supposed to have said chip from Ageia (or wtv)?
This would be cool, but i wonder how many would actually flock to it (if cheap enough (~40) then probably it would lead developers to assume its existence, and if not to default to using good old ix86).
Why not just get a Cell processor. Seems that it was specifically designed for this type of processing.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Nvidia solves Chaos Theory!
It's the videocard that contains the "evil". The IO access from userland is a "rather expedient thing".
Holy shit, dude.
10x? So if Im getting 72 fps on UT2007, I can expect 720 fps as a result of this technology?
damn, that's quite an improvement!
Seriously though, am I the only one who thinks TFA meant 10%? (% = percent)
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
No, in TFA the slide described a 15,000 boulder simulation that jumped from 6.2fps to 62fps with the physics offloaded from cpu to the SLI based gpu solution.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Nvidia solves Chaos Theory!
There is no such thing as "chaos". The idea of chaos is an illusion. "Chaos" as we see it is nothing more than order beyond comprehension. In fact, one might say that if you could process every atom, every quark, every sub-atomic particle down the quantum level...your destiny has already been written out for you in the cosmos.
Sad to think that freewill is nothing but an illusion to. Eh?
Life is not for the lazy.
Certainly you do not need a second 7900gtx to compute physics effects in games. This is just nVidia "putting their hands on your stack." GPU's are already incredibly good at doing these sorts of computations. A $100.00 video card would probably suffice. nVidia has designed SLI to work with symmetric board configurations but I don't see why they couldn't do a redesign to offload just physics computations to the second GPU (since they state that the intended configuration is to work with single gpu "next gen" configurations). Of course this would repurpose obselete and low end hardware which is something nVidia most definitely does not want to do. However, ATi's 'crossfire' seems to work with mismatched boards so when they implement this it will certainly be more cost effective.
Is Theo the G.W. Bush of the world of BSD?
Full environment destruction has been done already in Red Faction. In order to prevent maps from becoming piles of rubble, certain areas couldn't be destroyed, but it opened up new tactics like tunnelling between rooms, etc with explosives
Our approach produces better-looking movement than the low-end physics packages. We don't have the "boink problem", where everything bounces as if it were very light. Heavy objects look heavy. Our physics has "ease in" and "ease out" in collisions, as animators put it, derived directly from the real physics. When we first did this, back in the 200MHz era, it was slow for real time (a two-player fighter was barely possible) but now, game physics can get better.
Take a look at our videos. Few if any other physics systems can even do the spinning top correctly, let alone the hard cases shown.
i don't get it.
can you summarize?
Or stealing from the trash? Or masturbating?
Yay! I'm an investor!
... Most of you didn't get the point. It's not that you can access the GPU from userland (it depends on that access, but that's not the point). The main point is that that the current gen of programmable GPUs allow you to (theoretically) directly access kernel memory, as pointed out later in the thread by Theo:
> Are these new programable cards capable of reading main memory, which
> OpenBSD would not be able to prevent if machdep.allowaperture were
> set to something other than 0?
Yes, they have DMA engines. If the privilege seperate X server has a
bug, it can still wiggle the IO registers of the card to do DMA to
physical addresses, entirely bypassing system security.
Thus, a resourceful attacker theoretically could get access to kernel memory through anything which allows access to the video card. An unusual and probably difficult-to-exploit hole, but a possible hole none the less.
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Games nowadays are limited by, not the GPU but the CPU. Sure some of are top ranged graphics cards are now pumping out absolutely massive amounts of fps, but heres the thing:
7800GT VS 7800GTX
That may not shock you, considering the 7800GTX is a better, it costs more. Well it supposedly performs better AND it has more pixel pipelines available, faster memory speeds and more memory bandwidth. This is all well and good, but I DARE you to find me a decent comparitive benchmark that shows that there is aobut a $200 (AUD) increase in performance over those 2 cards. I mean real world, 2 fps is unnoticeable when dealing with high fps.
THe thing is the 7800GTX CAN perform much better, it is limited by the CPU. You might have seen that when you upgrade your cpu you get an increased FPS, however in the same system if you upgrade your already good video card to an even better one, you dont get too much of a boost.
Then why not take some of the load off the cpu, and put the gpu to work like it should be. The CPU can catch up, and all the excess power is getting used, hence why you could see a many times fold in the fps you could be getting. Although you are bogging down your GPU, overall you will see a benefit, and when cpu's catch up, or games are begun to delve into multithreading (seeing hte benefit of dual/quad core cpus), we can start shifting it back onto the cpu, until we find a balance.
It probably has nothing to do with the amount of packets needed to be sent, but rather just with the fact that more of the game world is visible as you said...
if only it was that easy ... .
P
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Are you nuts? They were always at least a decade behind the West.
Does he have this concern with soundcards, HDD controllers and network cards too? They've all got DMA capability, coprocessors, and firmware. Network cards even have network connectivity, making them potentially WAY more dangerous than a video card.
You've been scammed, I don't pay to masturbate, or steal from the trash!
-bZj
.sig
Isn't it ironic...
that you were "SOL" looking up what SLI was... then you tried to "RTFA" but the website was "NFG." I'm glad your high school required you to use the "Full English Version" or FEV the first time it was used in an essay. It really helped you.
...don't you think?
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Haha, sorry, didn't mean to offend. I meant the "Isn't it ironic..." and "...don't you think?" to go hand in hand... whoops. =P
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I agree with you. But the same goes for the US. In the cold war - we went from scratch to repeat moon landings in ten years.
May I remind everyone that the US was able to create a space program as quick as it did because of Operation Paperclip and the help of the Nazi V2 researchers like von Braun. Without these guys I'd doubt we'd have beaten ths Soviets (of course the soviets happened to 'borrow 'quite a few of their own scientists during their occupation of easter Europe so it still might have not been them first).
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)