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

Improves framerate by 10x

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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"...

All the answers to your questions...

[temojen]

www.gpgpu.org

10x faster?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Before people get too excited...

[LLuthor]

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.

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:You know what...

[geekoid]

"A monopoly is always bad for the consumer... this is one of the reasons socalism doesn't work."

You can have a socialist government, and market competition.
The USSR's "implementation" of socialism was flawed. Don't get that confused with actual socialism.

Re:I don't understand?

[lbrandy]

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.

Old School is new again?

[fallen1]

While I hate to ride a horse into the ground and then feed off its bones, every time I hear something like this happening I immediately think "Amiga". Why? I would guess that it is because the Amiga had a CPU and then it had dedicated chips to handle other functions - math, graphics, sounds, etc. This arrangement created a computer system that did not get surpassed for MANY years after its demise and, some would say, it still hasn't been bested in many areas (multi-tasking is one of those).

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.