Chip Promises AI Performance in Games

Heartless Gamer writes to mention an Ars Technica article about a dedicated processor for AI performance in games. The product, from a company called AIseek, seeks to do for NPC performance what the PhysX processor does for in-game physics. From the article: "AIseek will offer an SDK for developers that will enable their titles to take advantage of the Intia AI accelerator. According to the company, Intia works by accelerating low-level AI tasks up to 200 times compared to a CPU doing the work on its own. With the acceleration, NPCs will be better at tasks like terrain analysis, line-of-sight sensory simulation, path finding, and even simple movement. In fact, AIseek guarantees that with its coprocessor NPCs will always be able to find the optimal path in any title using the processor." Is this the 'way of the future' for PC titles? Will games powered by specific pieces of hardware become the norm?

Comments

Re:Yet another waste, years late

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I fully believe their claim is totally realistic. With a dedicated circuit to process A* or Dijkstra's algorithm (or solve generic network traversal problems) you could very easily beat a general-purpose processor by 200x. While computer CPU's are very good at doing a lot of different things, they generall y suck at doing specific things extremely fast. A dedicated DSP chip for example can easily outperform a general-purpose processor doing a DSP subroutine by 200x. If they can make these things cheap enough where they can start getting integrated into video cards or whatnot without affecting the price too much, I think they may have a chance.

Hardware becomes software becomes hardware

[kickabear]

This is just another spoke in the wheel of reincarnation. This too shall pass.

Re:hm

[Chas]

Jeeze. What the hell is with the whole accellerator thing now?

A physics accellerator which does jack and shit when compared and mid to high end graphics solutions. It's offloading some of the CPU load, sure. But at high-res, the CPU is NOT the bottleneck.

A network accellerator which is going to do jack and shit. It's offloading some of the network processing from the CPU, sure. See "the CPU is not the bottleneck". Sure, some people are going to build apps for the embedded Linux. Great.

Now an AI accellerator. So the AI runs faster. When the AI isn't really the issue. Nor is the CPU underlying it. It offloads the AI from the CPU, sure. See "the CPU is not the bottleneck". Nor is there a real need to have 60,000 AI running simultenously in a scene with 4 characters in it.

So what's going to happen? What difference is this going to make to your real gaming experience?

1. Jack
   
2. Shit
   

Re:My bet: it won't fly

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

a very good set of primitives

You mean like LISP functions?

You've practically stated the solution yourself - what we need is a LISP coprocessor. (I'd personally prefer Haskell but LISP is more traditional for AI.)