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The real nuke in Crysis. Do we need a PPU? (Not an Ageia thread)

Pottsey

Pottsey

Pottsey

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2006
Posts
5,375
This is not an Ageia thread or about the Ageia PPU. This is about PPU technology in general and how I believe the CPU is to weak for advance physics.

People where pointing out how Crysis and the nuke are reasons to not need a PPU. Well it turns out the nuke could have done with a PPU and its nothing like the beta demo that was shown ages ago. The CPU just cannot handle it. The nuke does not blow up buildings or trees and has a very small radius of destruction. If you make it blow up everything or increase the radius the CPU struggles and FPS drop down to a slide show.

Surely Crysis is prove we need something better then the CPU for physics. Either a PPU built into all motherboard, built into GPU’s or even the CPU.

http://www.dropshots.com/Titan7170#date/2007-11-10/23:46:50
 
I could be wrong but I thought the CPU did all the physics not the GPU. If the performance drops dueing physics then doesnt that suggest the CPU is the cause of the problem?
 
Not if the FPS drops because it requires a huge amount of graphical rendering.
You can't base anything off Crysis at it stands right now, the processor utilization is horrible, doesn't even max my dual core on 1280x1024.
 
I don’t see what would be huge amount of graphic rendering with a nuke. The FPS drop only happens when the physics kick in and objects are moved. The nuke its self looks pretty smooth. Its only when all the objects starts to move that problems awise.
 
Pottsey said:
I don’t see what would be huge amount of graphic rendering with a nuke. The FPS drop only happens when the physics kick in and objects are moved. The nuke its self looks pretty smooth. Its only when all the objects starts to move that problems awise.
Click to expand...

It's a fair point, it's just what people are saying is that PPU compatibility is not actually built into the game engine, it's been made so that it does all the physics using the CPU. Like the source engine.
 
martin9887 said:
It's smooth as anything for me when rocks and stuff start to fly all over?

I think if they used a PPU it would use it well, but not Ageia.
Click to expand...

I have no real problems with it either, have problems running the game in general but it doesn't get worse when the nuke kicks in.
 
With dual and quad core CPU's the whole idea of physics cards surely becomes obsolete anyway. A physics engine is quite simply to thread, as you could give every item its own thread if you really wanted to, so it would scale extremely well on multicore cpus. The graphics engine on a game is still largely dependant on a single core, leaving additional cores free.

So on a quadcore you can have CPU0 'Graphics engine', CPU1 'AI engine', CPU 2,3 Physics processing.

Oblivion already does this to some extent, but its running a fairly cut down version of havoc as it was designed to be playable on a single core system. So adding extra cores doesnt give 'that' much advantage.. although it does help a bit. But games designed to make 100% use of additional core can have a highly complex physics engine without the risk of bogging down the graphics engine. GPU's can also be used for physics, although I dont really see the point. As general purpose CPU's gain more cores, and get faster there will be less advantage to offloading physics to dedicated processors.
 
“With dual and quad core CPU's the whole idea of physics cards surely becomes obsolete anyway.”
Hasn’t Crysis just proved otherwise? Quad cores are way too weak. Unless there is a major bug thats yet to be fixed then going by the results even 8 to 12core wouldn’t be enough.
 
in either case I don't think you should be just scaling the existing nuke up. With a decently sized nuke they should be telling it to take all trees etc within a radius of x and removing them - not destroying them into bits, but just removing them from the surroundings because that's what would actually happen. You then only need to run physics on trees etc within x+y, that being the outer range of the nuke. X+y's never going to be massive and thus not too demanding.

@Pottsey - Crysis DOES have a quadcore bug - or rather it just doesn't use quadcore properly.
 
It's a pre-load as far as I'm aware, people have claimed to have downloaded it and have got their keys, but haven't been able to play it yet.

Jokester
 
Pottsey said:
“With dual and quad core CPU's the whole idea of physics cards surely becomes obsolete anyway.”
Hasn’t Crysis just proved otherwise? Quad cores are way too weak. Unless there is a major bug thats yet to be fixed then going by the results even 8 to 12core wouldn’t be enough.
Click to expand...

So you're basically going by the old idiotic approach that badly coded software just needs more hardware thrown at it?
 
“idiotic approach that badly coded software just needs more hardware thrown at it?“
No I am going by every single example of software does the same thing. Proving CPU’s are too weak for physics. People are going on how PPU’s are not needed because of game xxx and every time game XXX comes out everyone goes well its just badly coded software its not the CPU’s fault.

How do you know its badly coded software? Have you looked at CPU usage while the nuke effect goes off? Have you seen the source code?
 
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