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."

Comments

Nice

[BWJones]

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.

co-processor

[ZachPruckowski]

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.

General purpose GPUs

[Mr. Vandemar]

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"...

"Technology"

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The PURE EVIL contained in modern graphics cards..

[Homology]

Modern graphics cards can be used to bypass security measures as an unprivileged user (reading kernel memory, say). Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD reminded users how modern X works:

I would like to educate people of something which many are not aware of -- how X works on a modern machine.

Some of our architectures use a tricky and horrid thing to allow X to run. 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 is hard to see how they could have done other -- that is how much evil the cards contain. Most operating systems make accessing these cards trivially easy for X to do this, but OpenBSD creates a small security barrier through the use of an "aperture driver", called xf86(4) (...)

Re:10x faster?

[LLuthor]

10 times faster is not all that unreasonable.

I used brook to compute some SVM calculations, and my 7800GT was about 40x faster than my Athlon64 3000+ (even after I hand-optimized some loops using SSE instructions). So its perfectly understandable for physics to be 10x faster on the GPU.

Re:Why use a GPU, use a PPU

[jandrese]

I think the point is that this is for games where the bottleneck is in the CPU and the graphics card is sitting idle half of the time. By pulling 10% of the graphics card's resources to physics calculations, you could offload enough of the work from the CPU that it could keep the rest of the card completely fed and see a framerateimprovement with no additional hardware or loss in video quality.