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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? "
...they could use a card dedicated to keeping their server up when Slashdot finds it. It's already down for me.
picpix image polls. create - share - vote. fun!
Since Mainframes, I've always thought it makes more sense to modularize hardware.
While studying for my EE, I often wondered what the purpose of having a clock was, since so much of the individual chips often had finished their calculations before the next clock cycle came around.
I think we are going to see the clock go away, replaced with "Data Ready" lines, which will also help heavily in determining the bottlenecks in a given system (Hint: it's the system that is taking the longest to put up the "Data Ready" flag).
I also think that optics will be the way of the future. Quantum will be like Mechanical Television: cute idea, but impractical for mass production.
Optics. Think of it this way: Imagine a bus that can address individual I/O cards with full duplex, simply by using different colors for the lasers. Motherboards are going to get a lot smaller.
That's my opinion, anyway.
Joe
---
Q:Why couldn't Helen Keller drive?
A:Because she was a woman.
The link: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751
Short summary: Great for synthetic benchmarks, probably not real-world ready.
Without question, one of the hottest topics throughout the industry this year has been the advent of the discrete physics processor or "PPU" (Physics Processing Unit). Developed by a new startup company called Ageia, this new physics processor gives game developers the opportunity to create entirely new game-play characteristics that were not considered possible using standard hardware. Since its original inception, both CPU and GPU vendors have come to the spotlight to showcase the ability to process physics on their respective hardware. However, the Ageia PhysX PPU is the only viable solution which is readily available to consumers.
For the foreseeable future, the only vendors which will be manufacturing and selling physics processors based on the Ageia PhysX PPU are ASUS and BFG. With ASUS primarily focusing on the OEM market, BFG will enjoy a monopoly of sorts within the retail channel, as they will comprise the vast majority of all available cards on store shelves. Today, we will be running a retail sample of BFG's first ever Physics processor through its paces. Judging from the packaging alone, you can tell that this box contains something out of the ordinary. Housed in an unusual triangular box with a flip-down front panel, consumers can glimpse the card's heatsink assembly through a clear plastic window.
BFG Tech PhysX
Card And Bundle
Flipping the box, consumers are presented with a quick listing of features complete with summaries and a small screen-shot. Most importantly, the package also lists the small handful of games which actually support the PPU hardware. This short list consists of City of Villains, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport.
Upon opening the packaging, we are presented with a standard fare of accessories. Beyond the actual card itself, we find a power cable splitter, a driver CD, a demo CD, and a quick install guide. Somewhat surprisingly, we also find a neon flyer warning of a driver issue with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter that instructs users to download the latest driver from Ageia to avoid the problem. This is a bit disheartening as there are only three games which currently support this hardware. With this in mind, it is hard to not feel as though the hardware is being rushed to market a bit sooner than it probably should have.
Directing our attention to the card itself, we find a rather unassuming blue PCB with a somewhat standard aluminum active heatsink assembly. Amidst the collection of power circuitry, we also find a 4-pin molex power connector to feed the card as a standard PCI slot does not provide adequate power source for the processor. At first glance, the card looks remarkably similar to a mainstream graphics card. It's not until you see the bare back-plate with no connectivity options that you realize this is not a GeForce 6600 or similar product.
Thankfully, the BFG PhysX card does not incorporate yet another massive dual-slot heatsink assembly as so many new pieces of high-end hardware do these days. Rather, we find a small single-slot active heatsink that manages to effectively cool the PPU while keeping noise at a minimum. Removing the heatsink, we were pleased to find that BFG has done an excellent job of applying the proper amount of thermal paste and that the base of the heatsink was flat with no dead spots. After powering the system, we see that BFG has dressed the card up with three blue LED's to appease those with case windows.
With the heatsink removed, we have our first opportunity to glimpse the Ageia PhysX PPU in all its glory. Manufactured on a 0.13u process at TSMC, the die is comprised of 125 million transistors. Overall, the size of the die is slightly larger than the memory modules which surround it. Looking closely at the board, we see that the 128MB of memory consists of Samsung K4J55323QF-GC20 GDDR3 SDRAM which are rated for a maximum frequency of 500MHz. Unfortunately, neither BFG nor Ageia have disclosed what frequency the PPU memory and core operate at, so we are unsure
From what I was able to read of the article before it got slashdotted, it sounds like games that can take advantage of it require installation of the Ageia drivers whether you have the card or not. This leads me to believe that without the card installed, those games will use a software physics engine written by Ageia, which is likely to be unoptimized in an attempt to encourage users to buy the accelerator card.
Also, it's likely to use a proprietary API (remember Glide? EAX?) that will make it difficult for competitors to create a wider market for this type of product. I really can't see myself investing in something that has limited support and is likely to be replaced by something designed around a non-proprietary API in the case that it does catch on.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
I think that while this card can do some amazing physics stuff, we aren't ready to make use of that capability for anything more than a little eye candy. Not in networked games, at least. Trying to keep everyone's world in sync is hard enough as it is, without adding even more objects that need to appear in the same place for everyone.
Well coral cache has page 2 at leastc le.aspx?page=2&articleid=816&cid=2
http://www.hothardware.com.nyud.net:8080/viewarti
Anandtech posted these video sequences to show what you see with and without the card.
The Anandtech article states that the physics hardware slows down the framerates which Aegis can't possibly be happy about.
short for "abated"
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751
"The added realism and immersion of playing Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter with hardware physics is a huge success in this gamer's opinion. Granted, the improved visuals aren't the holy grail of game physics, but this is an excellent first step. In a fast fire fight with bullets streaming by, helicopters raining destruction from the heavens, and grenades tearing up the streets, the experience is just that much more hair raising with a PPU plugged in."
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
Ive been following them for a long time- their software demos blew my mind a few years ago (the one with the towers made of bricks that you could destroy oh so fun). We should wait for real games to make use of the physics. Ghost recon uses it as a gimmick. The tech demo game as listed in one of the articles is a real showing of what the card is capable of. When the game engines catch up and use it as an intrical part rather than a gimmick it will usher in a new era of gaming. It really will, look at what happened with hardware 3d.
Is there any competion for Aegis? Reviews are all fine and dandy but product comparisons is where the decisions should be made. It should be based on which PPU can perform a given task faster/better. Competition would also drive each competitor to better their own product to beat the other. However, they shouldn't be mutually exclusive (ie. If you use Product A, then you can't use a program with only Product B support).
I wonder how long it will be before there is a mainstream demand for a separtate physics unit (probably as soon as games require them). It sounds like a great idea to take some of the load off the CPU. Does this mean that now game performance will be more directly linked to the speed and power of the GPU and PPU and that the CPU will be more of an I/O director and less of a number cruncher?
I've seen numerous posts of people saying that they do not have any available PCI slots. Will the introduction of a new type of card lead to larger motherboards with more slots or might it lead to a small graphics card that does not monopolize the PCI space? Also, there is the concern of adding another heat source to the mix.
"Get you facts first - then you can distort them as you please." -Mark Twain
Not necessarily true. While dedicated cards for physics haven't existed, dedicated cards for other operations have, and much of the physics calculations themselves are still being done in games, just with an extra load on the CPU in software rather than a dedicated unit. As physics becomes a bigger focus in the realism of 3d games, perhaps it is in fact a foreseeable evolutionary step that specific devices would exist to process this.
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.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/Downl oadableAssets/So32v64-56k.wmv
Nice comparison concerning current 32-bit applications/limitations over 64-bit. If this video is TRUE, then I won't bother with a PPU - my Athlon 64 3000+ may already to be able to handle those extra physics calculations while any WELL-PROGRAMMED game will use any extra resources I have available for extra object/texture/physics rendering.
Sorry, IMHO, PPU is at a loss. Mod down at will.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Some day Slashdot will allow people to edit their posts for grammar and spelling, or perhaps there will be a Slashdot editor who knows grammar and spelling.
Still, I would have expected a bigger improvement in performance on existing stuff. There may be too much of a bottleneck getting in and out of the physics processor, which is the usual problem with coprocessors. I'd expect more improvement in fluids, particles, hair and cloth physics, which usually don't feed back into the gameplay engine and thus can be done concurrently with the main engine work. If you're banging boxes around, the main game engine probably has to wait for the physics engine to get the new box positions, so there's no big win there. Even if you have feedback to the game engine from cloth, you can probably delay it a cycle, so that when the cape gets caught in the door, it doesn't yank on the character until one cycle later.