Havok FX & Ageia

[Earthworm48]

Ok, I was wondering, since Havok FX is only for effects based physics and the Physx solution is for gameplay physics, in the future will we see a need to have more graphics cards alongside a Physics card? So you have to buy another GPU for Havok FX Physics and a PPU for the gameplay physics. It would probably be scaleable, but if I know that the high end is forever out of my reach it would make me a sad panda. Let's be honest, if you want to still have decent graphics performance and decent Havok FX you'll have to buy a pair of decent cards if it is implemented into stuff, rather than just having a single good graphics card.

 

[MrNasty]

That does seem to be the direction ATi/Nvid are taking - 2 cards are better than one...

Still, buying two of the exact same thing leaves a slightly bad taste in my mouth.

I think the whole Physics on a single graphics card question has long ago been answered: todays graphics cards are the bottleneck with anything above a 3600+ single core A64, and I don't see that changing next gen with conroe pushing CPU performance further... And they want to throw physics on that too?

 

[Earthworm48]

Its making me wonder about gaming on a PC, at least for a while, also. I mean, I normally buy the best card there is every so often, so say, for example, I'd buy a 7900GTX. With the Havok thing I couldn't afford 2 of these, that would be like £900. So I'd have too look at less maybe 2 7900GTs which would be £600-700 still, £200-300 more than a single GTX. With the Physics on one and the Havok on the other I'm not even getting as good graphics performance as I would have done normally. Remember also that as the Physx card isn't in direct competition on the Physics market as it does different Physics, thats another £220 (for the lower 128MB version) and who knows what the 256MB would cost? (Even though the current word from Ageia was that the 256MB doesn't exist yet pretty much).

This much money is just too much for too little at this point for me.