PhysX launched today.

King_Boru · 26 Apr 2006 at 08:26

ignore.

EDIT: The animation on the indiana jones game will work from an archive of movements and the second core will be dedicated to putting those movements together using a SCRIPT. Quite simple really, but not exactly what you would class as physics.

Arcane · 26 Apr 2006 at 10:04

Durzel said:
Pointless buying it until its supported, and anyone who does is gullible and has more money than sense.

What you have to realise Durzel is that many people (myself included) like to buy into new technology, it's as much about building, testing, tweaking and generally getting my hands on a new toy as it is about the products actual present usefullness and value for money. This seems to be going the same way as many of the Graphics cards threads, (i.e. people whining about it being pointless, not worth it etc), saying people are gullible and have more money than sense is actually pretty insulting.

Plasmoid · 26 Apr 2006 at 10:13

Angilion said:
Regarding using a graphics card as a physics card in addition to being a graphics card...is there enough spare processing power and memory? I'm not convinced that there is, particularly since any spare capacity on a graphics card can be used for more realistic graphics.

The PhysX PPU contains about 125 million transistors and is designed specifically for that one task. The cards also have 128MB of their own memory. I am not convinced that the card can be adequately replaced by whatever spare processing power and memory is available on a graphics card. It is not at all common that a complex specialist piece of kit can be replaced by spare capacity on something else.

I think we'll have a 3-tier system in a while. Low physics with just a CPU, low-medium with a powerful enough graphics card (which would probably also require reducing graphics settings) and high physics with a physics card (which will probably be a choice of PhysX cards, since I don't see any other company in the market).

The next question is - will games developers consider it worth the extra time needed to develop a game to run at 3 different levels of physics?

I think they probably will in terms of realism, e.g. more complex particle effects, more accurate deformation and destruction of game objects (like the tower collapsing in the demo video from the website) and stuff like that. That is relatively easy to implement in three levels, as it doesn't affect the game. PCs with more physics power will get a more realistic-looking game, PCs with less physics power will get a less realistic-looking game, but it will be the same game. It's analogous to graphics settings today.

I think they probably won't in terms of what is probably the greatest potential of a physics card - player-gameworld interactivity. I don't think we'll be seeing much of things such as the ability to pick up a gameworld rock, use it as a tool to break off a gameworld branch from a gameworld tree and use that as a club, except in the form in which it currently exists, i.e. in a limited context where written in by the programmer. That sort of thing affects the game itself, so the game developer has several bad options. Firstly, create a game which only runs on a PC with a physics card. Secondly, create a game in which players on PCs with a physics card have a massive advantage over players on a PC without a graphics card. You'd essentially have to create two versions of the game and keep them separate. Not just for multiplayer (which could be done by using different servers) but also for single-player, because the two versions of the game would have to be balanced very differently. Thirdly, don't support physics cards at all.

I think the whole physics via graphics cards is only going to work with SLI and crossfire setups, at least well. I think the thinking is that since the chips used to process graphics are quite similar to those used to do physics, a 2nd graphics card can do a bit of physics on the side a lot faster then any cpu and rivaling a dedicated chip.

The 3 tier setup is kind of what puts me off this a lot. It's not like graphics cards, where you have Direct X and OpenGL and ATI and Nvidia cards play nice, you have Havok and you have Aegia and absoloutly no compatibility between them. Developers arent going to use both, so only one setup will win.

I don't see a lot of people buying these cards while Havok is still going strong, but then again i would have said SLI will never take off.

n3x · 26 Apr 2006 at 10:43

at the end of the day which ever is best (havok/physx) will win! and seeing as many devs are jumping on the ageia bandwagon it looks to be going their way... im looking forward to what unreal engine 3 with physx will bring to the table

Needles · 26 Apr 2006 at 11:11

Truly I consider this another nail in the coffin for PC gaming, I mean the expense is going to be very shortly astronomical, I loved my PC as a gaming platform but as the time between PC generations shorten and the difference becomes less pronounced, ( I mean how many people have recently upgraded their graphics card just to increase frame-rate and not because the graphics card could not draw the actual graphics due to new graphical features ). The buisness model PC parts manufacturers follow is crazy, an new graphics platform i.e. DX9 is released, the manufacturers release cards that can display the graphics but not fast enough, so we must buy new cards, then developers start to use other parts of the same software, which the new cards can't display at all or not fast enough. So through the one generation of PC gaming, (DX9) up to at least three cards have to be bought although at the begining the card manufacturers promise the cards meet specification.
Now we have another software system, (physx) and we have yet another gear added to the already packed and economically unviable platform PC's represent for gaming. After taking spoonful after spoonful of this crap from PC manufacturers I decided that consoles will be my gaming platform, (as a lot of others have including games developers, the dearth of AAA PC titles is evident of this) and that the PC is only useful and economically viable for browsing, downloading and media storage and streaming to my 360, ( work uses also

). Truly sad times in the PC gaming industry

cleanbluesky · 26 Apr 2006 at 11:35

Excellent post Needles, I agree completely.

The new playstation will outperform PCs for gaming and in a single unit will cost less than a high-end graphics card and physx card, not to mention the latest Fatal1ty mousemat, CPU fan, mouse, soundcard on top of that.

What we need now is an all inclusive unit - like a 'gaming' card that does everything - and not stupid tiny little increases in power between each next 'top line' card...

Performance unthusiasts might screw their faces up in disgust BUT look at what has happened with console gaming - a guaruntee of compatible and non-rapidly changing hardware has meant that they have managed to squeeze far more out of their hardware than equivalent developers on PC.
If all gaming components were uniqied into one card, and less high-end cards brought out then likely coding would be much better and we wouldn't miss a thing. It would just like avoid PC gaming losing support due to the comparative inexpense of consoles...

Needles · 26 Apr 2006 at 11:44

Thanx CBS

, another valid point of this argument is that in comparison to small upgrades in the PC hardware market, there has atleast in this new generation of console been some true innovation, the 360's gpu is a work of art, the cell processor ( no matter what bad points people have, at least they were thinking out of the box ), and all the other small but pleasing to see innovations in the console market, ( and before I get a right flaming from the nintendo boys the revo's controller). They way I see the console manufacturers have taken a lot of the best parts of PC gaming and wrapped it up all in a neat little package.

SteveOBHave · 26 Apr 2006 at 11:48

Needles said:
Thanx CBS , another valid point of this argument is that in comparison to small upgrades in the PC hardware market, there has atleast in this new generation of console been some true innovation, the 360's gpu is a work of art, the cell processor ( no matter what bad points people have, at least they were thinking out of the box ), and all the other small but pleasing to see innovations in the console market, ( and before I get a right flaming from the nintendo boys the revo's controller). They way I see the console manufacturers have taken a lot of the best parts of PC gaming and wrapped it up all in a neat little package.

I agree, and they have never been trying to take away from the home PC/Workstation market. I believe that they have always been unfair comparisons. Granted it is interesting to draw parallells between the hardware.

The market that the 360 and PS3 are really trying to hook into is home entertainment, and this I believe they are having some success with! (Not holding my Blue Ray breath tho

)

Angilion · 26 Apr 2006 at 12:19

cleanbluesky said:
Excellent post Needles, I agree completely.

The new playstation will outperform PCs for gaming and in a single unit will cost less than a high-end graphics card and physx card, not to mention the latest Fatal1ty mousemat, CPU fan, mouse, soundcard on top of that.

What we need now is an all inclusive unit - like a 'gaming' card that does everything - and not stupid tiny little increases in power between each next 'top line' card...

Performance unthusiasts might screw their faces up in disgust BUT look at what has happened with console gaming - a guaruntee of compatible and non-rapidly changing hardware has meant that they have managed to squeeze far more out of their hardware than equivalent developers on PC.
If all gaming components were uniqied into one card, and less high-end cards brought out then likely coding would be much better and we wouldn't miss a thing. It would just like avoid PC gaming losing support due to the comparative inexpense of consoles...

I don't see the point of that. The card you're talking about is essentially a games console fitted inside a PC - why not just buy a games console?

There's very little chance of such a card being made, anyway. The card would be huge and the expense farcical, as you'd need to have several processors on the card, plus the memory. Either that or place several specialised processors on one chip, which would require a huge chip and that's very expensive indeed. This is assuming you could use a PCI-E 16x slot for one. If not, it's new motherboard time.

If it happened, many of the companies making PC hardware would go out of business. We would definitely be left with just one graphics company and probably just one major company, the one that makes this card that does every gaming function and which is identical in each PC, plus some business hardware companies. The lack of change in hardware would probably bring down many of those companies, too.

Innovation would slow right down, with a new release every two or three years (which is the whole point of your idea) and no competition.

All this to make a PC an uncompetitive games console. Uncompetitive because games consoles are sold at a loss, which is hardly attractive to PC hardware manufacturers. Uncompetitive because you'd still have more complex hardware issues than with a games console, because this "games console card" will be in a PC, and that will make development more complex.

The "new" Playstation doesn't exist yet and will no doubt be outperformed by PC hardware when it does. If not immediately, then within weeks after it's launched. If it ever is launched.

PCs are not games consoles. I don't see any point in trying to make it so.

Reiver · 26 Apr 2006 at 12:32

Yeah but 50 quid for a game on the 360! If you buy a PC to last a year and a half, buying maybe 2 games a month, the cost balances out.

SteveOBHave · 26 Apr 2006 at 12:42

Reiver said:
Yeah but 50 quid for a game on the 360! If you buy a PC to last a year and a half, buying maybe 2 games a month, the cost balances out.

Danger Danger Will Robinson...

It really isn't worth trying to compare the two. They are two different platforms that happen to share a common ability to play games, each to varying levels. I could say that my BBC B+ plays games, and that a 360 leaves it in the dust. Conversely I could say that my "Blue Gene" does much the same to a 360.

This is not an argument that will produce a fair or reasonable result. There is no comparison between a 'PC' and a 'Console'

FYI: Blue Gene:

On March 25, 2005, IBM's Blue Gene/L prototype became the fastest supercomputer in a single installation using its 65536 processors to run at 135.5 TFLOPS (1012 FLOPS). The Blue Gene/L prototype is a customized version of IBM's PowerPC architecture. The prototype was developed at IBM's Rochester, Minnesota facility, but production versions were rolled out to various sites, including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). On October 28, 2005 the machine reached 280.6 TFLOPS with 131072 processors, but the LLNL system is expected to achieve at least 360 TFLOPS, and a future update will take it to 0.5 PFLOPS. Before this, a Blue Gene/L fitted with 32,768 processors managed seven hours of sustained calculating at a 70.7 teraflops—another first. [1] In November of 2005 IBM Blue Gene/L became the number 1 on TOP500's most powerful supercomputer list.

BubbySoup · 26 Apr 2006 at 12:49

Originally Posted by cleanbluesky
If all gaming components were uniqied into one card, and less high-end cards brought out then likely coding would be much better and we wouldn't miss a thing.

We wouldn't have the consoles you can enjoy today if it were not for the breakneck speeds at which Nvidia & ATI develop and release PC hardware. Most of the innovation & development required for the new generation of console GPU's has its roots firmly in PC territory.

Needles · 26 Apr 2006 at 13:15

The point I was trying to make was that adding yet another add-on for the PC to able to play games is the reason why the PC gaming market is on the way down, it increase's the cost to the everyman PC gamer who finds he can't afford yet another component to make his PC compatible with the latest game when there is hardware available to do the job (dual-core processors). It smacks of lazy programming but wait maybe not, maybe physx will like nvidia go down the it plays better with nvidia route and entice developers to make it compulsary that for you to get the game to play the way you see it in the trailers you have to go and buy yet another bloody add-on card. It is a just another way of opening up a new revenue stream instead of manufacturers innovating current product lines (graphics cards) and only releasing new items when there is truly something new to sell and not just another hike in speed to replace a card or chip that wasn't fast enough or had the right spec to do the job in the first place. And also to give developers the time to use the tools and hardware available to get the best out of the systems instead of telling them that a faster one is coming soon so they release un-optimised code for current products and the guy who just bought a £300 graphics card doesn't get shafted.

SteveOBHave · 26 Apr 2006 at 13:23

Needles said:
The point I was trying to make was that adding yet another add-on for the PC to able to play games is the reason why the PC gaming market is on the way down, it increase's the cost to the everyman PC gamer who finds he can't afford yet another component to make his PC compatible with the latest game when there is hardware available to do the job (dual-core processors). It smacks of lazy programming but wait maybe not, maybe physx will like nvidia go down the it plays better with nvidia route and entice developers to make it compulsary that for you to get the game to play the way you see it in the trailers you have to go and buy yet another bloody add-on card. It is a just another way of opening up a new revenue stream instead of manufacturers innovating current product lines (graphics cards) and only releasing new items when there is truly something new to sell and not just another hike in speed to replace a card or chip that wasn't fast enough or had the right spec to do the job in the first place. And also to give developers the time to use the tools and hardware available to get the best out of the systems instead of telling them that a faster one is coming soon so they release un-optimised code for current products and the guy who just bought a £300 graphics card doesn't get shafted.

I see what you are saying, and in a way agree with you. What I don't agree with is that PC gaming is on the way down. I think it is due for an overhaul. Unfortunately not being a psychic, I can't predict what that future change will be.

Maybe you are correct, the PhysX could well be the straw that broke Joe Bloggs back. But because of the nature of a PC and the various other applications for them, I firmly believe that they aren't going to go away in a hurry. Knowing what I am like, I'll still use mine to play games regardless. Contrary to popular belief, the consumer drives the market not the other way around, and hardware and game developers know this.

Plasmoid · 26 Apr 2006 at 13:23

SteveOBHave said:
It really isn't worth trying to compare the two. They are two different platforms that happen to share a common ability to play games, each to varying levels. I could say that my BBC B+ plays games, and that a 360 leaves it in the dust. Conversely I could say that my "Blue Gene" does much the same to a 360.

This is not an argument that will produce a fair or reasonable result. There is no comparison between a 'PC' and a 'Console'

I dont quite understand what your trying to proove... your saying i cant compare glorified pc called an xbox to a pc on the ground that you like the bbc.

They have similar hardware, run the SAME games (only ported) and generally are aimed at similar people.

An Xbox is a pentium 3 derived processor stuck in with very little ram and an old geforce. An Xbox 360 is an three core IBM power pc processor with an Ati Radeon based graphics card and lost of new shiny ram. In theory you can build a pc with similar components to both. You can even get the same games for both. IMO on that basis there is a comparison.

Dont know how we got there from talking about PhysX which plays no part in any console.

Needles · 26 Apr 2006 at 13:34

No you can't buy the same ati part for the pc it doesn't exist yet there are no unified shader gards or embedded dram cards out there and probably won't until DX10, and if the 360 can utilise it's 2nd core for physics why can't a dual-core pc.

BubbySoup · 26 Apr 2006 at 13:55

Needles said:
No you can't buy the same ati part for the pc it doesn't exist yet there are no unified shader gards or embedded dram cards out there and probably won't until DX10, and if the 360 can utilise it's 2nd core for physics why can't a dual-core pc.

Who said anything about a 2nd core on the PC not being able to be used? The main point is the PPU can do it so much better than a 2nd core. The 360 doesn't have a PPU so it has to use another method - this doesn't mean it is the best way to do things. Even if you had an entire CPU free, it would not be able to handle a tenth of the physics calculations a PPU could.

I don't understand why so many people are having a problem with this. A CPU can also be used to calculate many of the processes that the GPU handles, and indeed in the past, this is what it used to do. Now look what dedicated hardware has done to the graphics scene. IIRC when 3DFX first brought out their accelerator card, the exact same arguments about prohibitive cost were thrown about.

inactionman · 26 Apr 2006 at 15:57

A lot of people here don't seem to understand that the PhysX cards are the only hardware, at the moment, that can do real hardware physics (i.e. game changing physics like the boxes you can interact with in cellfactor). The ATI/Nvidia solution that is currently proposed can only do physics related graphics effects (i.e. eye candy like particle effects, water ripples, etc.).

One has a serious effect on game play (PhysX), the other just makes your graphics look a bit more realistic! Eventually the two may meet, but currently they do different things, and one is basically being missold to sell more graphics cards!

I'll be buying a PhysX card as soon as a decent game comes out that supports it (GRAW probably).

Lanz · 26 Apr 2006 at 16:03

The thing is "real hardware physics" wont be available on multiplay games, as the server wont be able to keep track of all the extra particles, so multiplayer games will only use the eye candy type effects for a long time yet. Hence the GPU solution, although not as good, will probably win through, as when it boils down to it, online gameplay is what people want.

Plasmoid · 26 Apr 2006 at 16:05

It is true that the proposed graphics card physics from havok has only been used for eye candy.

But seriously, we are a year away before any developer is going to bother considering taking extra time out to code something that can only be run on one of these new cards. No one is going to dare make anything that has a physical impact on multiplayer game that needs one of those cards for even longer because games need to make profit.

Look how lazy developers are in supporting dual core and 64-bit and considering how many of them are about it hardly looks promoising that physx will make an impact anytime soon.

I reckon the card will just do eye candy in all but the tech demo's until either the price comes down or a new generation of them launches.