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All GeForce 8 Graphics Cards to Gain PhysX Support
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed exactly what it plans to do with the company's PhysX physics processing engine. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Nvidia is working to add PhysX support to its GeForce 8 series graphics processors using its CUDA general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) application programming interface. PhysX support will be available to all GeForce 8 owners via a simple software download, allowing those users to accelerate games that use the PhysX API without the need for any extra hardware. (Older cards aren't CUDA-compatible and therefore won't gain PhysX support.) With Havok FX shelved, the move may finally popularize hardware-accelerated physics processing in games."
Aw crap! I was going to buy an ATI.
This gives much more sense to buying all those dual GPU cards out there. However, they do consume quite a bit of power and therefore contribute to global warming by taxing the power stations more.
:P
So Ageia's stocks go up, nVidia's down. I hope I didn't plant any ideas into the heads of the green peacemakers.
I knew buying a PhysX was a waste of time. Now they're effectivly useless - I already have an 8800.
...what will be calculating my 3D images, if the GPU is already working on the physics? It is not like there is so much spare capacity left over in modern games anyway...
I hope the NVIDIA acquisition and now this news will drive the adoption of the PhysX Engine. Right now, if you look at the list of titles, the PhysX Engine is not used by many games (namely, mostly Unreal3-Engine titles).
If the adoption picks up, maybe Havok (which is now Intel property) will not remain the only physics engine in town, but right now, this news will not affect a whole lot of games...
1. CPUs and GPUs today are extremely powerful and have a lot of design thrown into them. To design a physics processor that markedly supplements these costs lots of money.
2. Even if you design such a physics processor it needs to have custom support in every game to sell well, but to sell well it needs to have custom support in every game. This means few people will buy it.
3. See 2 - just to get food on the table you have to sell it hideously expensive, and just to get people to stock it you need to give them very generous wholesale prices. So it's expensive but you don't make much from it.
4. See 3 - if you are selling a small number of units very expensively and are still struggling to stay afloat, it's likely that actual design and R&D struggles.
5. Your product sucks and doesn't do anything useful, but it has probably had a lot poured into marketing. The perfect target to buy for a dime and have people feel good more cheaply.
so now that my vid card is processing the 3d graphics and the physics (which is really only eye candy) how about we make it -the gpu- run the O/S tooo!!!! ooo ooo my next summer project! have linux run on just the video card! (openmosix is still around right :-D?) :-p
what?!?!?! it runs on everything else. right now i'm typeing this on my old 700mhz laptop running the latest debian :-p
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
> AMD has open sourced their Radeon drivers. What more could you ask for than that?
GPL Licence? better support for linux from AMD themselves?
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Physics covers a lot, from gravity, inertia, particles, collisions, IK and various other bits and pieces. Not everything lends itself to acceleration. So what will be accelerated by this?
How old are you? Serious question.
Snot dripping from my snort hole.
YGBFK
Who gives a shit how old anyone is? It's an interesting question.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
If existing cards can be upgraded thrugh a software patch, NVidia should have been able to do this all along. Are the PhysX people just much better at coding physics, or is there another reason this haven't already been added?
In other words, did NVidia just buy some clever code?
Pfft! The global warming. The electric bill doubling or trippling will put a crimp into this "buy more hardware" plan! No wonder we need alternative lighting. Now we can plow the savings right back into buying more geek gear. Two steps forward. One back.
Isn't the real problem that the games that DO incorporate PhysX hardware support don't really showcase the technology in any carnal desire type manner. There's no equivalent of GLQuake, that drove adoption of the original 3D cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html CUDA can run on some pretty cheap cards now.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
I wonder if we'll see Sarbanes-Oxley invoked here? If not, it will be a significant dent in the legitimacy of Apple's software update charge war-cry.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
I had an ATI card once. The open source drivers (no mode switching) worked better than the binary ones (black screen). And the binary ones complained that, despite buying a card in a box plastered with "RADEON" and the ATI logo, it was not an ATI card, and therefore unsupported. Fuckers.
I've been a happy owner of NVidia cards ever since.
That is all that matters for me, increasing my folding score!
Its good to see PhysX support, I know it was worth keeping my limbs rather than selling a arm or leg to make Ghost Recon Advance Warfare 2 to work good.
One might think reluctance to adopt PhysX would be knowing that a large number of your customers don't use NVIDIA cards and therefore wouldn't be able to take advantage of the technology.
It's almost the same reason why game companies aren't making their games Vista only.
I have nothing compelling to say
Hello fellow adult-AC.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html Steam hardware survey (which I think is a fair representation of gamers - the people who use this stuff most) gives nVidia over 50% market share. 8 series is a little over 11% of all graphics cards used. There's already a fairly sizable market - and one that is only going to get bigger.
Any physics done on a PhysX card is only eye candy.
The latency to get the results of the calculations back from the card is high enough that your frame rate would cut in half (or worse) if you waited for the results. So games use it for particle effects, and render the results a frame or two behind. It doesn't matter at all for pure eye candy stuff, but it's just not useful for anything affects gameplay.
I agree, hardware physics needs a killer app. I was playing around with the idea of adding PhysX support to Quake 2 and modifying some maps to have real liquids instead of the fake water it normally had, but after making some tests apps I realized how incredibly slow the physics are on a CPU. I'm not holding my breath, but I hope the GPU is capable of at least playable frame rates.
I knew as soon as I posed that somebody was going to hit me with some statistics.
ATI isn't in the throes of death. One assumes that if Nvidia holds 50% of the market some other video card manufacturer probably holds that other 50%. My guess is it would be ATI. Who I'm guessing would make every effort to push back against Nvidia.
Nvidia still needs to convince more of the bigger studios like id and Valve to use their technology exclusively. Which probably won't happen. Because if they start building engines locked down to one specific card their licensing potential goes way down after that. You basically have to own a specific Nvvida card in order to play the game, as opposed to whatever card you happen to have in your system.
I have nothing compelling to say
Thank you, nVidia and Ageia, for saving me from spending $150 on a Physx card! I was very close to buying one, but now I won't have to!
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This might sound silly, but exactly what does PhysX do? And what would I benefit from having PhysX support on my new card? I know a few games I might want to get that use PhysX (Unreal Tournament 3), would that make those games run faster?
If you have a single core CPU, I suspect this will speed up UT3. However, if you have a multi-core CPU, it could be different. One core runs the game, another the PhysX is software, and the video card has all free resources to rendering.
I have a feeling that benchmarks will reveal nVidia enabled PhysX will SLOW down UT3 framerates.
Life is not for the lazy.
Stop lying. You haven't done anything of the sort.