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Why do PhysX cards need so much RAM?

One thing I found myself thinking the other day (complete nerd state of mind :D), I was walking down the street and it suddenly occured to me that being able to put something like that street, with all the people, their thinking and frame's of mind, deciding if they should go into Boots or Argos, to put all that into a game would be so amazing.
But there's literally an infinite amount of choices to every action, so trying to program AI to be realisticly like a human mind would be impossible, so I doubt we'll see it in Crysis. :p
 
“Ie. A game set in a city, where instead of having to go down alleyway A to get to alleyway B, you can blow a hole in wall A, and walk straight into alleyway C. There's so many possibilities that it'd be mind-boggling. The amount of manpower needed to program all the posibilites would take forever.”

Red Faction has all that. You can blow up almost everything even make underground passages. I never understood why more games are not like Red Faction's environment destruction. Is there some sort of downside to Red Factions method?
 
Pottsey said:
“Ie. A game set in a city, where instead of having to go down alleyway A to get to alleyway B, you can blow a hole in wall A, and walk straight into alleyway C. There's so many possibilities that it'd be mind-boggling. The amount of manpower needed to program all the posibilites would take forever.”

Red Faction has all that. You can blow up almost everything even make underground passages. I never understood why more games are not like Red Faction's environment destruction. Is there some sort of downside to Red Factions method?
Click to expand...

I have always thought this - the idea of destructible environment has been around for a while but most have shied away from it... even the guys at Aegia are only hinting that their product is capable of this by showing objects that can deform or break but from the game demos we have seen, this hasn't been utilised - merely tech demos.

TBH, even Crysis (which looks absolutely fab) does not seem to have that ability to deform and destroy your environment...
 
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A lot of games have very linear gameplay and scripted AI, suddenly appearing through the wall or something would mean a lot more programming to do in that area.
 
NickK said:
1. Can the card be used by people interested in non-gaming applications?
Click to expand...

Yes I think there's several 3rd party plugins for Maya and 3dstudio etc that uses the card, its meant to be pretty good too.
 
yes i have played red faction 2 and it amazed me with its damageable terrains. problem was the game itself was flawed since there was not enough scripting to provide a real reason to blow walls up etc. would have been very good in half life 2.
 
Yeah, another mention for Red Faction over here. The engine they used for their deformable walls and terrain was amazing, it ran perfectly on a little old PS2 and yet you could blow holes in walls, floors, anywhere you liked. You could even turn on infinite ammo and build a huge network of tunnels with explosives if you wanted. Always wondered why more devs haven't used it, as Red Faction's implementation was great, but the game didn't take much advantage of it at all!

It's clearly possible already, and I hope more people pick up on the idea as gamers like me love being able to blow stuff up. :D

As for the actual topic ;) I don't understand why they need so much RAM, either. I mean, sure, you need to store coordinates, velocities etc. of objects but you'd need a huge number to actually get up to 128mb of stuff - thousands and thousands of objects, surely? Perhaps it's just futureproofing the card for if/when devs want a ton of interacting objects, although tbh looking at the poor performance we already see with low object numbers, I wouldn't like to see 10,000 +! :eek:
 
Can't comment on RF as I haven't played it, but in Red Faction 2 I thought the terrain thing was a bit of a gimmick. Some of the terrain was indestructible (for no logical reason aside from gameplay continuity) and in other areas it was basically a case of 'having to do it' to progress part a certain bit - or in other words just a simple puzzle to solve.

Crysis does look rather excellent however.
 
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