Ageia PhysX Tested

MojoKid writes "When Mountain View California start-up Ageia announced a new co-processor architecture for Desktop 3D Graphics that off-loaded the heavy burden physics places on the CPU-GPU rendering pipeline, the industry applauded what looked like the enabling of a new era of PC Gaming realism. Of course, on paper and in PowerPoint, things always look impressive, so many waited with baited breath for hardware to ship. That day has come and HotHardware has fully tested a new card shipped from BFG Tech, built on Ageia's new PPU. But is this technology evolutionary or revolutionary? "

Comments

I don't see this as long lived

[throx]

I really don't see a custom "Physics Processor" being a long-lived add-on for the PC platform. It's essentially just another floating point SIMD processor with specialized drivers for game engine physics. With multicore+hyperthreaded CPUs coming out very soon, the physics engines can be offloaded to extra processing units in your system rather than having to fork out money for a card that can only be used for a special purpose.

In addition, there's already a hideously powerful SIMD engine in most gaming systems loosely called "the video card". With the advent of DirectX 10 hardware which lets the card GPU write it's intermediate calculations back to main memory rather than forcing it all out to the frame buffer, a whole bunch of physics processing can suddenly be done through the GPU.

Lastly, the API to talk to these cards is single-vendor and proprietary. That's never been a long term solution for longevity (unless you're Microsoft), so it won't really take off until DirectX 11 or later integrates a DirectPhysics layer to allow multiple hardware vendors to compete without game devs having to write radically different code.

So, between multicore/hyperthreaded CPUs and DirectX10 or better GPUs with a proprietary API to the card... cute hardware but not a long term solution.