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GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support

helmutcheese

helmutcheese

helmutcheese

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Well they always said they could add a PPU to a Graphics or Soundcard.


QUOTED


" During Nvidia's fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Nvidia shed a little more light on its acquisition of Ageia and what it plans to do with the firm's PhysX technology. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made no announcements regarding the deal until asked in the question-and-answer session, but he was happy to divulge a decent number of details.



Huang revealed that Nvidia's strategy is to take the PhysX engine and port it onto CUDA. For those not in the know, CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and it's a C-like application programming interface Nvidia developed to let programmers write general-purpose applications that can run on GPUs. All of Nvidia's existing GeForce 8 graphics processors already support CUDA, and Huang confirmed that the cards will be able to run PhysX.

We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes. . . . Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA.
Huang thinks the integration will encourage people to spend more on graphics processing hardware, as well:

Our expectation is that this is gonna encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might—and probably will—encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot. And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics.
Last, but not least, Huang said developers are "really excited" about the PhysX-to-CUDA port. "Finally they're able to get a physics engine accelerated into a very large population of gamers," he explained. Huang was unwilling to get into a time frame for the release of the first PhysX port. However, considering this will be purely a software implementation and Nvidia now has Ageia engineers on its payroll, the port may not take too long to complete. "




http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14147
 
lol, in other words, nvidia waste physx which brings into question why they'd buy it in the first place? just to shut them the hell up so they can stop throwing money to make a "competing" product. ie spend 400mil on their own physx type card, or buy the company, shut them up and give it all up.

obviously this will be useless on the card you have, if you run a game and take power away from the game you lose framerates. so in a few sli games where the sli performance isn't needed you can turn 2nd card to physx instead. can anyone name one of those games? no, neither can I, or anyone.

But this still screams developer non support because. again, you can buy a physx card already, for not much, but its useless, this isn't added support from your gpu, its buy another gpu and run phsyx, again whose gonna do that? if you have a 8800, you won't want to buy a 8600 for physx as when you can't use it, in the 99.99999999% of games that can't use it, you'd want another 8800 for sli.
 
Nymins said:
So what my 8800GTS 320mb will just get a driver update and it will work right away? Cool :D
Click to expand...

no you'll get a software update, then, when you buy a 2nd 8800gts, you can go ahead and use it for phsyx, instead of sli. so you have between a 20-80% sli performance boost or, 4 extra particles in explosions.
 
drunkenmaster said:
lol, in other words, nvidia waste physx which brings into question why they'd buy it in the first place? just to shut them the hell up so they can stop throwing money to make a "competing" product. ie spend 400mil on their own physx type card, or buy the company, shut them up and give it all up.
Click to expand...
That's not what the article says. The PhysX API is still there, they're just porting it all across to their CUDA system so that it's in a language that Geforce 8 graphics cards can understand.

That said, thank God that dedicated PPUs are now 100% dead and finished with.
 
Wonder if it will have to work purely on SLi boards.

With a second spare 16x slot on my X38 it would be cool if i could buy two NV cards and have one function as a physics card.

gt
 
If its just using a second GPU for physics then there's no reason for it needing SLI. Not to say Nvidia won't limit it to SLI boards though.
 
great so instead of buying PPU card we buy another nvidia card instead and also a nvidia chipset motherboard to put it all on ? do you think microsoft and nvidia could be brothers
 
Ulfhedjinn said:
That's not what the article says. The PhysX API is still there, they're just porting it all across to their CUDA system so that it's in a language that Geforce 8 graphics cards can understand.

That said, thank God that dedicated PPUs are now 100% dead and finished with.
Click to expand...


we'll see, they want to try and use it a little, but expect no more software and nothing to be done about it. i was speculating that spending 400 mil developing there own stuff, getting in staff to code it and spending money on an ever continuing product would end up costing more than just buying out the competition and slowly quietly letting them die. As everyone see's buying a 2nd nvidia gpu is just as pointless as buying a physx card, nothing at all has changed except, i guess, some possible performance loss porting the code over. Physx sales sucked, and support was even worse than the sales, nvidia letting it run on their cards is all well and fine. unless theres 200million transistors in a 8800 gpu that was waiting for this to run alongside graphical processes, then you need a 2nd card. I'm sure nvidia will make a little money back selling a few more dell rigs with sli instead of single card plus a physx card. But it won't be long before they dump it too.

The ONLY difference here is that Nvidia pay dev's lots of money to code to work with their kit well anyway. but Dev's still have little incentive to make anything significant "physx" only in games, mostly as theres little it can do, secondly, nvidia don't dominate gpu sales, intel do and ATi are selling great numbers in mid/low end and probably getting better in the £100 bracket, but thats 5% of the market. making games run better on nvidia kit is one thing, making games ONLY run on nvidia kit is a completely different ballgame.
 
The irony here is excellent!

You wouldn't buy a PPU, but you'd buy an extra card just for physics related tasks. :p

Disclaimer: I do not condone the use of a PPU, they are a pathetic waste of money. ;)
 
cant see what the point is, get another graphics card to do physx, or just buy a proper physx card, still got to pay out

id rather have my graphics card/s working to there full potential doing graphics not physics

seems a waste of time an effort, imo it would have been better to do an embedded physx chip on there motherboards, or even just re-brand the ppu to nvidia

looks like they are just going to throw away the current hardware

at least there will more games with nice physics effects though
 
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