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

Looks like...

[nathan s]

...they could use a card dedicated to keeping their server up when Slashdot finds it. It's already down for me.

Slashdotted, but I got the first page

[mobby_6kl]

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

Skeptical

[HunterZ]

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.

Re:Skeptical

[HunterZ]

I also remember that in its day Glide was faster and resulted in higher quality 3d than OpenGL or DirectX.

For a while, since 3dfx was the only one innovating for a while. Once they got hold of the market, nobody else could because the games only supported Glide, and nobody else was able to make Glide-supported hardware due to it being a proprietary API.

Then nVidia came along with superior cards that only supported Direct3D and OpenGL because Glide was 3dfx proprietary. Game developers were forced to switch to D3D/OpenGL to support the new wider array of hardware. Since 3dfx cards were overly-optimized for Glide, this resulted in games that ran crappy on 3dfx hardware but great on nVidia. The rest is history.

EAX is a similar story. Creative owns it, but what has happened is that many game developers don't bother to take advantage of it, instead relying on DirectSound3D or OpenAL as the lowest-common-denominator. The widespread use of SDKs suck as Miles Sound System do also help to allow transparent use of various sounds API features though, so mileage varies. Personally, I've been without Creative products for years now and haven't missed them one but. I'm currently waiting for the next generation of DDL/DTS Connect sound cards to come out, and then I'll give those a shot.

The same thing is likely to happen here; competitors will make their own products, but because they won't be able the use the PhysX engine they will make their own. It will be an open API because they'll have to band together to get game developers to support their cards. Ageia will be forced to add driver support for the standard API, but it won't perform as well on their cards. If they're smart, they'll either open the API early on, or else release new hardware built around the open API. This is all assuming the PPUs even catch on, of course.

The problem with the PC gaming hardware market is that when there's only one company making a certain type of product, they tend to stop innovating. Then, when someone else develops a competing product they try to use marketing to stay ahead instead of coming up with more competitive products. Sometimes gamers see through the marketing (3dfx) and sometimes they have a harder time doing so (EAX). It will be interesting to see how it turns out this time.

Re:Wave of the future...

[AuMatar]

The purpose of a clock- ease of development. With a clock, you can advance new input into the next pipe stage at known intervals, allowing each stage to finish completely. Without a clock, you need to make sure that no circuit feeds its data into the next part too soon. Doing so would end up causing glitches. For example, if the wire that says to write RAM comes in at time t=0, but the new address comes in at time t=1, you could corrupt whatever address was on the line previously. With a clock, all signals update at the same time.

Its possible to make simple circuits go the clockless route. Complex circuits are nearly impossible. There's no way a p4 could be made clockless, the complexity of such an undertaking is mind boggling. Even testing it would be nearly impossible.

The problem with data ready flags is the same as with the rest of the circuit- how do you prevent glitches without a latching mechanism?

And this isn't about modularizing hardware. Its about adding extra processing power with specific hardware optimizations for physics computation. Wether its a good idea or not depends on how much we need the extra power. I'm not about to run out and buy one though.

Actually, in desktops to day the trend is to remove modularization. AMD got a nice speedboost by moving the memory controller into the Athlon (at the cost of requiring a new chip design for new memory types). I'd expect to see more of that in the future- speed boosts are drying up, and moving things like memory and bus controllers are low hanging fruit.

Ghost Recon video

[jmichaelg]

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.

it's BATED breath, dammit

[Rimbo]

short for "abated"

Re:it's BATED breath, dammit

[drewmca]

I think your point is mute.

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.

Re:Wave of the future...

[complete loony]

Of course this argument falls down with graphics processing. While it is true that today's CPUs could probably process the graphics engine from games 5-7 years old, the bandwidth and processing requirements of current generation games is very different to the types of problems CPUs normally handle. It's a type of problem that generic CPUs can't keep up with. Physics may be a similar type of problem, one that can be performed far more efficiently than a current CPU can handle. That said, there has to be a large market for such a device to fund the R&D for future revisions or the generic CPU will catch up again.

With graphics, small visual differences between hardware implementations are not a big problem. Physics processing needs a standard interface, and precise specs on what the output should be. If there is only going to be one vendor, and one proprietary interface, this market will fail.

I wish I could mod this up 100 points.

[joe_n_bloe]

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.