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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."
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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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...
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...
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given than GPU->CPU readbacks are a notorious perfomance killer.
That has not been true for a long long time. Since PCIe became a standard, bidirectional communication between CPUs and GPUs has been as easy as unidirectional communication.
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By offloading physics from the CPU to the graphics card, this improves frame rates?
Yes. Why does that surprise you? When you do incredibly complicated physics simulation, things can be very parallel and consequently GPUs outperform CPUs.
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.
You seem to be under the impression that your GPU cycles are more important than your cpu cycles. This is done with SLI for a reason..
If it does increase frame rates, then I would suggest why not improve graphics rendering rather then physics processing.
Because the quality of the render is controlled in software? Because hardware is currently limited by, ya know, physics and technology?
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.
And in other news, offline processing is still more powerful than online processing. There's a shocker.
I would prefer if nVidia and ATI actually focused on bringing cinematic quality 3D rendering to gaming, instead of just claiming they do.
First of all, 99.9% of what nVidia and ATI do is exactly that. They are also starting to realize that the GPU paradigm, with minor modification, can be turned into a very powerful co-processor... and they are the experts at creating those types of chips. The market for them is growing... and they don't want to miss the boat.
I want smooth high-poly models with realistic lighting and 60fps.
And I want peace in the middle east. Give it 10 years, one of us may get our wish.
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.
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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.
I read the internet for the articles.
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.
Your comment reminds me a bit of this article. Concerning the reasons for the lack of success of the American Institute of Communist Studies' program for granting certificates certifying something that someone said is "communist":
"And lastly, for reasons unknown, the AICS decided that half of the advisory board would consist of Communists and half of Libertarians. Since Communists believe that practically no one is a Communist including each other; and Libertarians believe that just about everything is indicative of Communism including most extant forms of Capitalism, the board reached an impasse in about half a second. "
Democratic Party needs food badly.
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.
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