Something occured to me..(ATI PPU)

Dooom

Just browsing through various computer forums, and I've noticed a few things about ATI going on about how their physics solution won't be ready for 9-12 months and so on.

But something just struck a note - the majority of modern physics in games is handled by the CPU, and with ATI bringing out their physics solution in a while and having merged with AMD, then does this not mean we might see quite a good PPU of some sort from them?
Whatever Nvidia come out with, I think the ATI PPU might be somewhat decent now that they've got AMD by their side...

Khannie

nVidia have said that they're going to use some hardware accelleration of the havok engine from the GPU. I think that a dedicated PPU is a no-brainer (in the medium term). I'd love to see ATI and AMD bring something new to the market, though I think aegia deserve some reward for their ballsiness.

Black Swan

Just wondering if this would be better placed in the "Games" forum to get more of a response?

Ruu_Old

Its fine here and well the mod of the forum replied to the post, I guess he doesnt have a problem with it.;)

Dooom

It's not really games related though, tis more hardware.

Tbh Khannie, I'd expect ATI's PPU to be pretty decent considering they are now best friends with AMD. Call it a hunch.
I agree with you on Aegia though, it's pretty impressive what they did. Unfortunately everyone saw it and thought "Bàstards! We should've thought of that.." and jumped on the bandwagon with their near limitless budgets.

That said though, the Aegia PPU's are gaining more momentum - they recently released a new patch that allows Bet On Soldier to work with the PPU.

8T8

I'm rather pessimistic about the whole PPU thing, if dual/quad core CPU's do a "good enough" job with a multi-threaded physics engine then you can kiss the PPU good bye in the long run. Even Ageia's own Cell Factor demo showed this when people figured out how to disable the PPU and found that most of the effects could be handled well by a dual core CPU.

The AMD co-processor technology called Torrenza is currently intended for the Operton but it will make it's way to Athlon's by 2008 but ATI has no need for creating such a device like a PPU.

Direct-X 10 supports outputting to devices without a display plus a few other important enhancements which makes it much more suited to physics on GPU's which means that offloading Havok physics to a DX10 class GPU will be a lot easier or any other physics engine that chooses to support it.

In the long run you could see drop in GPU for AMD's Torrenza platform that could also do physics duty but an actual dedicated PPU card there is no need in their eyes seeing as a combo of discrete graphics cards & multiple core CPU's will do the job.

gizmo

8T8 wrote:

Even Ageia's own Cell Factor demo showed this when people figured out how to disable the PPU and found that most of the effects could be handled well by a dual core CPU.

Not completely true, there were some features which annihilated the frame rates.

8T8 wrote:

Direct-X 10 supports outputting to devices without a display plus a few other important enhancements which makes it much more suited to physics on GPU's which means that offloading (Havok physics) to a DX10 class GPU will be a lot easier or any other physics engine that chooses to support it.

Not to mention DirectPhysics.

Also don't forget the guys at Havok, HavokFX is looking amazing.

astrofool

I think the big problem with using a GPU for physics is that it seems to be mostly limited to non-interactive things that look cool, rather than actual things which players can change the behaviour of. Good scripting could do what the GPU's are proposing for physics atm, tho ATI may change that as the x1k series has more general programmability on chip then the nVidia GPU's.

And in the games forum, this thread would be relegated to fanboy drivel.

8T8

Faceless Man wrote:

Not completely true, there were some features which annihilated the frame rates.


Not to mention DirectPhysics.

Also don't forget the guys at Havok, HavokFX is looking amazing.

The cloth and the fluid effects yeah but the whole box moving about thing was fine and that's were the "good enough" comes in I have a hard time believing people will fork out cash for that if a dual core CPU does most if it.

[Of course a developer could artificially limit what effects are handled by the CPU in terms of physics with Ageia's software to encourage PPU adoption but people may not buy the game then so it is a tricky balancing act]

Ageia's PPU so far hasn't shown off any killer titles and most reviews of the PPU come away with the view leaving a lot to be desired.

DirectPhysics doesn't exist, no need yet as far as MS is concerned Direct-X 10 and GPU's will do the job with third party physics engines.

I think that if the PPU fails to gain any traction Ageia will call it a day and simply embrace GPU support (their physics engine is already multi-threaded for CPU's).

gizmo

8T8 wrote:

The cloth and the fluid effects yeah but the whole box moving about thing was fine and that's were the "good enough" comes in I have a hard time believing people will fork out cash for that if a dual core CPU does most if it.

Hrm, not sure if I agree with that. Its a similar argument to that which was used with graphics a few years ago and now look at where we are.

8T8 wrote:

DirectPhysics doesn't exist, no need yet as far as MS is concerned Direct-X 10 and GPU's will do the job with third party physics engines.

Heh, we'll see about that one.

8T8 wrote:

I think that if the PPU fails to gain any traction Ageia will call it a day and simply embrace GPU support (their physics engine is already multi-threaded for CPU's).

Ageia have ALOT of money invested in the PPU and they're definitly thinking about the long term hence I don't think they'll be calling it a day anytime soon.

Dooom

Hmm, something's nagging about those multi-core CPU's. Does anyone have any idea of the clock speeds of the quad-cores?
My train of thought is this: Is it just a case where the CPU is broken down into more parts but in order to do this the clock speed is dropped back. So we might see the physics using one core, AI for another core etc., but because the CPU's speed has been lowered, the physics core or whatnot would suck compared to a dedicated PPU?