ATI's hardware physics processing threat. Let the conspiracy theory begin!

[theforce]

I was going to post this on another threat as a reply but it was closed before i could post there and this matter in my opinion is worthwhile for discussion.
As said in that thread is JUST to speculate on what AMD is cooking stating that they are going to have physics on their cards.

As we all know Nvidia bought Ageia and Intel bought Havok and we don't know of another company that is into this market. So i ask, who is it possible ATI will have this feature on their 48** video cards.

Many say that is just a marketing trick which is the most possible scenario. But...there are other possibilities to explore. Let's share what you guys believe ATI has cooking.

I have a theory of my own that you can disapprove or approve which goes like this: Intel bought Havok and plans on releasing Larrabee which from what i know is a GPU that has 16+ cores. Now the nice thing is that the cores will be like the cores we have today x86 BUT modified for graphics processing.

Either using rasterised graphics or vectors to do the job is not important since Intel will likely or probably already have written the Havok API, Larrabee is going to used and is x86 based. Name is SEE5 or SHK from what i know AMD can incorporate this technology aswell since Intel and AMD have an agreement.

Since Intel now hasn't got any hardware to implement this technology could it be possible for AMD graphics devision to have found a way to compute only that x86 Havok physics instruction set on hardware?

What are your theories on the matter?

 

[tutu]

On a smiliar topic, i'm betting DirectX 11 will have unified physics on GPUs so neither Intel or nVidia will have a say

I thought Intel were aiming at RayTracing anyway? Something that CPUs are supposed to be good at.

 

[Vince]

Hi there,

Toms hardware, seem to think that it’s a possibility that they have used its GPGPU capabilities from professional FireStream cards. I'm not so sure what’s going on here, AMD could have quite easily dismantled Havok and modified its instruction set or could just be using their own implementation.

I was wondering more about the compatibility and how games developers are going to differentiate and code for the possibility of three individual platforms, Intel’s Havok, ATI own implementation and NV's Physics or whether they will all be thrown to the wayside due to increased complexity and non standard platforms.

 

[-iceblade^]

i dunno how they'll sort out compatibility and marketing issues, tbh, and if that is a fail, then the whole endeavour will be one too

look at the PhysX card scandal

 

[amkan13]

On a smiliar topic, i'm betting DirectX 11 will have unified physics on GPUs so neither Intel or nVidia will have a say

thats a good call, dx10 initially called for virtualization of memory before that requirement was dropped, microsoft still want it, and that could tie into using it for physics as a part of directx

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Are they not doing the Ageia PhysX (now being done by Nvidia), seen as Nvidia are letting anyone who wants to do PhysX have the APi for free.