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

Naah, not anytime soon

[Gr8Apes]

I think that AI and physics co-processors have a better future as part of the CPU, rather than an add-in board. Perhaps as additional core(s) on an AMD processor, with full access and feedback to the CPU proper?

Why not use a spare core for this?

[peter Payne]

Um, computers have multiple cores. Unless I am on drugs, I don't think games are using the extra core(s) as much as they could, if at all. How about making one core in a dual core processor do the AI calculations, and the other core do the "main" stuff? Since cores are only going to increase, this seems logical to me. It's not like any kind of card you plug into your computer would ever be accepted by the market/developers.