BFG PhysX PPU 128MB

[ElementalDragon]

uuh.... if you ask me..... physics on the chipset... or anywhere on the motherboard.... wouldn't really be helping. what's the reason we have video cards, and sound cards.... and now have PPU's? to take the processing of video, sound, and now physics off the CPU, as well as freeing system RAM. putting physics on the chipset would basically make it have to share the system ram. and NVidia and ATi are already making drivers for Physics on GPU.... but from what they say, it still won't be entirely capable of doing what a stand-alone PPU can do, since then it will be sharing the video card's RAM.

 

[Steevo]

The down side is RAM for a video card is cheap compared to a engineered, tested, built, stand alone card.

Perhaps if they mounted the PPU on the back side of the graphics card and shared a RAM while adding a bit more, made a short fast bus between the GPU and PPU, and something like ATI's Ring bus for memory interface......

 

[ShepsCrook]

Well, they could have an integrated processor and ram for it. Really, it wouldn't be THAT bad. Or an Integrated Processor, and an expandable memory slot specifically for the PPU. So you could go out and buy a 512MB DDR3 or whatever it uses chip to expand it's memory.

 

[Aprox]

I hope to see either the Ageia or Havok/Nvidia effort intigrated into CGI physics production. Precision physics takes quite a while to compute... not as long as rendering mind you but still a while. It would be great to see either of these technologys intigrated into Reactor or other production level software suites.

 

[Terrahertz]

Well the "Direct Physics" API is coming from Microsoft so things should be better in the future just like what direct x has done.

 

[iceman7311]

i saw an aritcle the other day that said ati is working on a way to make one of their video cards do all of the phisics prosessing. they called it something like 1+1 for a single video card and a single video card doing physics and 2+1 for crossfire and another video card doing physics. ati claims that the 1900 xt can do 9 times the physics calculations thta the ageia card can do. one is supposed to be able to use any card from the 1xxx series for physics.ill try to find the article that i saw and post it.



edit: http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTA3OSwxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==


there we are. how would you like to have three 1900 xtxs running in your case. then you would really be having overheating problems.

 

[ElementalDragon]

hence the reason i doubt that their 2+1 will be liked very much. they don't leave really ANY room for cooling, nor any room for expansion.... can barely squeak a sound card in with 3 dual-slot cards. even worse is the dual slots don't even vent out the back anymore, so you're pumping a boatload of heat right into the case. it'll probably wind up doing what a PhysX card did to my computer....... raised the temps just enough to make stuff overheat. 1+1 might be effective..... but i'd rather have dual video cards and a physx adapter than use a single card and physx. i could probably get a new physx card now, since i have two vf900's on my cards, but i'ma wait a bit..... see how much prices might drop..... also see if any other revisions of/to it come out.... maybe an even better fan on the Asus one, or a better fan on the BFG version.

 

[LeeJend]

ATI does not see their physics technology as an offload for the CPU but rather processes a new category of features know as “effects physics.”

That is not the same thing. The ATI version is just going to make enhanced visual effects.

A true physics processor will handle massive trajectory and object dynamics. Hundreds of missles and shots in the air at the same time. BF2 play gets laggy on my system when too much is going on at once like in a 30 man firefight. Basicaly it's a super math coprocessor external to the chip with math functions optimized for game play dynamics. Which has got to be choked to death with a PCI lsot inteface.

Maybe the gaming CPU's need to go back to seperate math processors on one header instead of dual CPU. Thinking about it that second PCU in a dual core setup up is just screaming to be multiothreaed with the physics tasks.

One thing I did note in BF2. The vehicles drive disgustingly real. Bounce, cannon recoil, inertia. All make getting a shot from a moving vehicle very hard just like for real.

On the other hand an X1600 would make a nice cheap PPU if you have 3 16x PCIe slots which nobody has.

 

[ElementalDragon]

yeah.... exactly right Lee..... completely forgot about the whole afformentioned (sp?) "Effects Physics" thing.

and also correct in your last line. everyone says "boo hoo, i don't wanna spend ~$250-300 for a PhysX card when PhysX on GPU is coming out". next they'll be crying when they either have to lose their crossfire setup or spend probably close to $200 for a new mobo to support 3x PCI-Express slots so they can keep their crossfire and another boatload of money on their third card to use as the PPU. then like someone said in the Guru3D forums.... if it (PPU's) get a lot of support, and make a massive difference, we may even see on-board PPU's, which to me made no sense since it'd basically be doing absolutely nothing... moving physics calculations from the CPU and system memory to an on-board chip that would probably also wind up using quite a bit of CPU resources and sharing system RAM. Then someone said maybe they'd have upgradable RAM chips for a possible on-board solution.... which in my head is ringing "system RAM".

Think havok themselves have said that Physics-on-GPU alternatives won't be quite as powerful as a dedicated PPU. correct if you think about it, since it has it's own dedicated RAM, and it's own dedicated connection to said RAM.

 

[LeeJend]

Thinking about it maybe they have already gone too far with the physics effects. I can't hit **** when riding shotgun in BF2 vehicles. The guns bounce around so much with the simulated road roughness, terrain, and main gun recoil my aim is always ruined unless we're parked.

Too much of a good thing...