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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?
One begins to wonder what the "endgame" scenario for the respective manufacturers of the physics and AI cards we're seeing. I can foresee three distinct situations:
1) The CEOs, investors, and engineers are complete idiots, and expect all the gamers of the world to buy separate physics, AI, and graphics cards
2) They're hoping to provide chips to ATI or nVidia for a "game card" instead of a "graphics card", the next generation of expensive purchases for gamers
3) They're hoping to provide chips for the nextgen xbox / playstation / wii, hoping that their chips will be the ones to make gaming interesting again.