PhysX Dedicated Physics Processor Explored

Ned_Network writes "Yahoo! News & Reuters has a story about a start-up who have created a dedicated physics processor for gamers' PCs. The processor undertakes physics calculations for the CPU and is said to make gaming more realistic - examples such as falling rocks, exploding debris and the way that opponents collapse when you shoot them are cited as advantages of the chip. Only 6 current titles take advantage of the chip but the FAQ claims that another 100 are in production."

Comments

Re:Is that what I think it is.

[TubeSteak]

Chess games rely on brute computation to up the difficulty level.

Anything the programmers can do to examine more moves into the future is a good thing for them. Even Deep Blue couldn't look more than 30 moves into the future. Dunno about the 'son of' Deep Blue.

Animations, etc consume trivial amounts of CPU/graphics power compared to examining the next XY possible moves in a chess game.

Massively destructible & collateral damage.

[Ned_Network]

Bah! They cut some of the best bits of my submission!

The price of $300 seems a bit steep right now to a casual player like me, but this bit from the site's FAQ I find very appealing:

Buildings and landscapes are now massively destructible with extreme explosions of thousands of shards of glass and shrapnel that cause collateral damage

The PPU seems to be available as a PCI card but is also available in off-the-shelf machines from Dell & Alienware.

There's a comparison video showing the difference between Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighterwith & without the PhysX installed and a couple of hi-res videos that are available by FTP, so can't be cached by Coral, I don't think.

What I really have to wonder, if this thing is as good as they reckon, is why I haven't heard of it before?

Multiplayer

[lord_sarpedon]

There's a major flaw. Multiplayer gameplay requires certain clientside behaviors to be deterministic, otherwise clients will fall out of sync. Physics is one of those. If Bob uses a PhysX card and an explosion lands a box in position X, but Alice, without a PhysX card, has the same box in position Y, then there is a problem. Both can't be right. The server would have to correct for discrepancies such as that because the position of a box affects gameplay; bullets and players can impact it. Perhaps more position updates would have to be sent to make sure Alice ends up in the same spot as Bob. But what about midflight? I suppose this doesn't matter for blood smears and purely aesthetic effects, but as the videos show, thats not where PhysX really shines. This puts a physics accelerator in an entirely different class than a graphics card. You can adjust your graphics settings, but the quality of your physics simulation in multiplayer can only be as good as the least common denominator without killing gameplay for some of the parties involved. Sure, AGEIA could have non-accelerated versions for everything in its library when acceleration isn't available that produce the same result, but then you are offloading the entire functionality of an addon card on to the cpu...imagine running Doom at full settings using software rendering. Extreme example. But that defeats the very purpose of the card, if developers are limited because most of their customers might not have it.