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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."
The 8800GTX has 8 groups of 16 stream processors, and they are the main graphics processors.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Better is very subjective. We have both nVidia and ATI based thinkpad laptops running Ubuntu at work. And what I've noticed is that the ATI ones can do a kernel update with out screwing up the gfx drivers and they can switch between single and dual monitors (necessary when going on and off dock) without restarting X. On the other hand the nVidia ones have a pretty lil graphical config tool, while the ATI ones use a somewhat arcane and unreliable command line program. Personally I wouldn't trade my ATI one for an nVidia one any day, I very much like being able to unplug from the dock and switch down to single screen without closing and restarting all my apps.
How old are you? Serious question.
See my other post for what doesn't work quite right with my ATI card. I guess there might be a difference between desktop and laptop, but most of those things aren't an issue for me. Can't say a kernel update has ever screwed up the graphics drivers on my work machine with an nVidia card, but then I use the Livna repositories for Fedora to download the RPMs for the graphics along with the kernel update.
From what I understand of this (and I could be wrong), the physx accelerator is primarily used to add eye-candy -- so things like showers of sparks, sprays of blood, geysers and clouds of dirt or water or snow on an impact (whether a footfall or a weapon strike...), leaves falling when you shoot trees, better hair and clothing, clouds, rain drop impacts, etc, etc.
All the physics processing for all those particles can be offloaded to the physx engine, allowing more particle effects to be going on at higher level of detail and realism (e.g. incorporating 'wind' etc..) without dragging down the cpu.
Its cool... but not earthshattering. And its a logical step to incorporate it into a video card.
I don't honestly know if it it can really be used to assist with the trajectory calculations of the interactive players tank or fighter plane or whatever, etc... but I doubt it. And it probably doesn't matter either. That is a minor part of the scene...each shower of sparks by itself probably requires more physics calculations than an entire squadron of planes... more independant particles in the shower.
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?
No it wasn't a waste of time.. the PhysX-card is much better at calculating physics than the 8800 which is already busy enough doing 3D.. So the combo of 8800 with Physx-card is much better than using a dual 8800..
I don't think that's the case. Graphics cards work on the same PCI-X buses that acceleration cards probably use lately. They use DMA to communicate with main memory without involving the processor. The VRAM might be optimised for writing, but it should be very possible to do calculations on the card, and get the results back. That's the whole point of the generalised GPGPU techniques.
On physics being done in the CPU as well, and on physics engines not being used for much beyond extra eye-candy... well, it's the natural consequence of having machines without that feature as standard. You can't rely on it for the core gameplay, therefore it's only used for bonus features.
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.
As an OpenGL developer, I can say that I will never touch an ATI product when I have a choice.
Their driver support lags behind nVidia by years, and when they "support" a feature, it will often be in software with no warning that it is - so instead of failing with a useful error message, all you know is that *something* you did causes your system to render at 1 frame per minute and be completely unusable.
I have spent weeks bending over backwards and through hoops to get our ATI test card to agree with me, just because it is so darn unresponsive when anything goes wrong. Non power of two texture in one of your models because the modeller apparently ignored your instructions? No warning, no error - just a hung machine that will take 5 minutes to kill the process.
Give me nVidia any day.
Since I upgraded to an 8800GT from an old 7-series card, performance in Windows has rocketed but graphics in Linux have gotten slower, and the display is full of glitches too. They actually had a bug in the drivers where the fan ran at 100% constantly, making the computer sound like a leaf blower whenever I was booted into Linux, and it took them over a month to fix this.
Unless they get their act together soon, this shall be my last NVidia card.