Amazing AGEIA real-time water demo!

[iNsuRRecTiON]

Check out the front page of Guru3d! They have pictures of the PhysX PPU ;) (don't know if these have been posted yet... but why not? :) ) or check out PCpop!

Hey,

nope, I want this interview and read it, nothing else!

I have read and see pictures, etc. of it on another websites, already..!

I complaint about that this webpage is not available any more, for days now..

thx and best regards,

iNsuRRecTiON

[iNsuRRecTiON]

im glad its going to be 199, and not like 350 or somthing. 199 seems like the most justified price. although i hope the games that support it at launch, are actually good ;)

Everything over 150 EUR is too high!

There is already an AI extension card on its way for 2006..

I don't pay for a soundcard more as 150 EUR and this is the same about such a PhysX add in card..

If the price is over 150 EUR for such an add in card, then many PC user don't going to buy such a one!

thx and best regards,

iNsuRRecTiON

[subbo]

199 is a ripoff! You can get a A64 3400+ for that and I bet it has more floating point power than some silly PCI addin card, unless of course the AGEIA folks suddenly became smarter than AMD and Intel put together.

And what about a dualcore CPU, I bet the second core can trump AGEIAs products any day, unless of course they deliberately dumb down all the software versions of their physics engines so as to sell more PPU cards.

[AthlonXP1800]

199 is a ripoff! You can get a A64 3400+ for that and I bet it has more floating point power than some silly PCI addin card, unless of course the AGEIA folks suddenly became smarter than AMD and Intel put together.

And what about a dualcore CPU, I bet the second core can trump AGEIAs products any day, unless of course they deliberately dumb down all the software versions of their physics engines so as to sell more PPU cards.

No it not a rip off, a $199 PhysX card cost much less than $299 to $399 original thought. Hardware PhysX are capable to process 40,000 objects on screen, ever a A64 3400+ can only do software physics that process around 100 objects, that about as many physics objects you see in Half Life 2. A Dual core CPU can process around 300 objects, so CPU are still not powerful enough to do 40,000 objects.

[gmontem]

199 is a ripoff! You can get a A64 3400+ for that and I bet it has more floating point power than some silly PCI addin card, unless of course the AGEIA folks suddenly became smarter than AMD and Intel put together.
A dedicated number cruncher can do more numerical calculations than a general purpose processor.

[Rakeesh]

Well, it is mostly that this card's processor would be designed specifically to process vector functions. E.g. it can probably do many physics related calculations in one clock cycle that it would take a general purpose processor about 20 clock cycles to do.

If anybody here has taken calculus 3, you'd know that vector math is a lot more complicated than regular arithmetic. E.g. things like dot product, cross product, and even add, subtract, multiply (more or less,) and divide are a lot different when it comes to vectors. From what I understand, a PPU would handle operations like these natively, whereas a CPU can only perform basic arithmetic operations (in order to get more advanced than that, you have to break it into more complicated formulas of bigger arithmetic functions to end up with the same result, thus the CPU is less efficient.)

Say for example if you need to calculate the magnitude of a given vector in order to calculate e.g. the velocity of a brick. You'd have to apply the pythagorean theorem. That involves upwards of 15 or so steps if you do it in regular arithmetic, depending on how many dimensions the vector has. This PPU for example could have the silicon space for an instruction that does this very commonly used physics function all in one step. That would be a waste to have something like this on a CPU on the other hand as your average program rarely if ever would actually perform such an operation (games being the exception of course, but then CPU's aren't designed just for games, whereas a physics card would be.) I am generalizing here though as this is a hypothetical example; I don't know if they'd actually do that specifically in a physics card, but I would imagine that they do something along those lines.

[sandeep]

What could be the possibe difference between physics processors? Cheap vs expensive processors.

I am looking forward to Physics processor, but hope they can make the water look realistic enough to complement its physical nature.

[russ_3d]

im guessing we may have different resolutions of cards. the first card does 40k objects, and the 2d card maybe does 400,000 and they go up like that.

also, ageia have said that later cards will add in different types of physics.

i think they are trying to get rigid bodies and water for the first card. then it will get more complicated and higher 'resolution' for later cards, much like a normal gfx card. then i guess cloth,hair,atmosphere.. i cant think of any else... ehat else could they want to add in?

volumetric atmosphere and fogging would be lovely - i hate the standard fog in games we have now... ]the graphics card and physics card line is getting blurred now isnt it :D exciting times.

i just hope it isnt too cheesy at the beginning. it needs to have that l33t spark in it, and not seem like a gimmick card. you can do it ageia :)

[_Thanatos_]

I hope it'll be PCI-express. I don't have free PCI slot :(.

[jAkUp]

It will be a 4x PCIe slot :)

[OWA]

Looking at the pic in Maximum PC, it has a fan. That's fine as long as it isn't loud, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

[jAkUp]

Yup, the early hardware has a fan. However, the AGEIA guys told me it may not need one...

[OWA]

Cool, that's good news. I'd prefer that it doesn't have one but it probably wouldn't stop me from getting one if it does.

[russ_3d]

oh yeah, im also interested in the fact that futuremark are using the ageia SDK to make some sort of physics benchie. i know it may not be needed atm but it sure is a funky idea :)