Nvidia killed the PPU star

I think the point is we really shouldn't assume anything at this point.

The crutch between Ageia and Havok right now will be the games that use those physics engines and benefit from physics acceleration.

If game A uses Havok FX and accelerates on your GPU it won't accelerate on Ageias PPU meaning your PPU is sitting there useless.

So really it is up to the games you will be playing.

Let's take this announcement for what it is, a tech preview of what will be possible.

We need games to be delivered to see what the real-world benefits actually are.
 
Brent_Justice said:
I haven't seen it on a single GPU so I really have no experience to know if we will or not. It is up the game developer to determine how they want to leverage a single GPU for rendering their games. They could use some processing power for physics and the rest for 3D, it is all up to them. They could use it just to speed up things or they could use it to add more detail in the world. I hope for the latter.

Again I'll say, this is just a technology preview to announce what is capable.

The actual results are still unknown, we won't know until the first game is released taking advantage of this.

Obviously NVIDIA is pushing this with SLI to show the best benefit in gaming.
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i can envision a slider... |3d|===||=====|physics| :D
 
^
I was thinking about that too, still Nvidia wouldnt blackmail BFG as BFG is one of its leading Sellers. Maybe it means nothing, who knows.
 
at the get go, we are gonna have to have both anyway...

if we want all the games, that is.
 
Jason711 said:
at the get go, we are gonna have to have both anyway...

if we want all the games, that is.
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It would be nice, but more expensive.

The main problem I see is what I posted above, Game A will use Ageia for PPU acceleration, Game B will use your GPU. If you want to play both games at their full physics potential, you'd need both implementations.

I can't wait to see how it all plays out. The benefit Havok FX has is that the SM 3.0 install base is already there.

I think it will come down to what big game titles support the physics acceleration and what the real-world benefits are, plus the cost of implementation and ease of use.
 
Brent_Justice said:
It would be nice, but more expensive.

The main problem I see is what I posted above, Game A will use Ageia for PPU acceleration, Game B will use your GPU. If you want to play both games at their full physics potential, you'd need both implementations.

I can't wait to see how it all plays out. The benefit Havok FX has is that the SM 3.0 install base is already there.
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i agree its less than stellar, but ageia already has some pretty good developers behind it. the UT fan base alone is pretty expansive.

and i aswell cannot wait to see what happens.. i have been chomping at the bit ever since the announcement of the ppu... its taking forever!

i also dont wanna seem like a !!!!!!, however and whoever gets it to work best and cheapest for us, the consumer, has my dollar.
 
Brent_Justice said:
The benefit Havok FX has is that the SM 3.0 install base is already there.
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understatement of the year

also

We need a poll to see exactly which slot people will be installing there ppu in.
Will you be removing your x-fi card? Or forgoing SLI in order to have an available slot.
 
the physX card will be PCI.. later on PCI-E... 1x at that.

i will simply add it with my x-fi. :D
 
Take any SLI motherboard on the market right now. Add 2 7900GTX or 2 7800GTX512 and an x-fi. Where does the ppu go?
 
Aegia DOES have Unreal 3.0 on their side.....

banned_user said:
So apparently you could dedicate one of your two carrds in SLI completely to the physics with this system. Im not sure if id want a 500$ card doing the physics by default, but its still something cool to play around with.
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QFT. Let's buy 7900GTX SLI so that I can dedicate one card to physics! yay! $1000 for $500 performance. -_-

meatfestival said:
I think a good solution would be generic DSP cards which can be used for sound, graphics, physics etc. I bet there is a lot of untapped power on Creative X-Fis, for example.
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lawl!

wrangler said:
Take any SLI motherboard on the market right now. Add 2 7900GTX or 2 7800GTX512 and an x-fi. Where does the ppu go?
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screw the x-fi! Onboard 5.1 is good enough for me. I prefer performance over sound anyway. ;) Get some waterblocks if you don't like that dual slot cooler.

-------------------------

I think the only reason this might succeed is that it's based off Havok. The physics will be vastly inferior to the PPU. We already know how many objects the PPU can handle AND its number of transistors. 200 million transistors dedicated to physics will freaking OWN a 260 mill transistor graphics card retro-programmed to do physics.

I'll wait to see some benchmarks to make a final decision though.

-----------------------

And I'd like bring attention to the fact that BFG is both making PPUs and nVidia GPUs. As is ASUS. ASUS even makes nForce mobos too.
 
Russ said:
Aegia DOES have Unreal 3.0 on their side.....
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Don't know if it is going to benefit from the PPU yet though.

And there is no "retro-programming" going on. GPUs are there, ready to accelerate whatever you throw at them, thanks to their programable nature. They can do sound, they could do AI, they can do physics, they can even do folding.
 
Lets put it like this.
Dont you hate it when you shoot a rocket launcher at a window or door and all it does is leave a black mark when everything in sight should be blasted to shreds?
The physics PPU will let you blow up everything. EVERYTHING. The problem here is that games use fixed polygon counts for objects.

Warning: tangent On paper the xbox 360 was supposed to just use the "primatives" (the lines and curves that make the shape of the model) and then tesselate these into zillions of polygons in real time. For the sake of speed, they didnt do this. Instead they just tweaked frame rates by adjusting polygon counts, and having different level of detail models based on object proximity.

By the same measure, a game where you could destroy everything in the game world would have to have fixed polygon counts for all the objects you could destroy in it. Lets say there is a building there you could bust up. This includes all the windows, doors, furniture, walls, EVERYTHING. In order to scale the physics up and down you would need to have high poly, medium poly, low poly versions of that building and everything in it for every level of physics capability. Its safe to say this isnt something the developers can do.

The only other way would be realtime tesselation of everything. That way developers could "select" how many pieces an object busts into when its destroyed.

But who knows how far away that is, if ever.
 
wrangler said:
Seriously. What happened to BFG trumpeting the PPU? Nvidia now at GDC saying they are going to handle PPU duties. BFG was/is(?) the North American distributor for Aegea PPU and now their mama (nvidia) is saying "use our video cards for PPU".
Any correlation? Am I being a conspiracy theorist? Anybody?
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I think they are waiting for games to support the PPU before selling it.
 
not going to pretend i've read the whole thread but,

its interesting in theory, but in the end it seems more of just a marketing gimmick than anything else..

having to turn down graphics to gain some physics may sound appealing, but only when we get to a point where the GPUs are idle more often than not..

right now there are still games that push current GPUs to the limit, having to add on top of that physics calcs into the same GPU just seems like wanting to do too much..

IMHO the seperate physics chip is a much better "enthusiast" solution..

now if Nvidia would have come out and said they where adding Physics chips onto their GPUs then i'd have been excited.. but this is nothing more than saying we are moving the physics calculation from your already burdened CPU to your even more burdened GPU..

but as an option its good, just not the best solution and in no way will it kill they PhysX chip.
 
Sure, you or I might be willing to watercool or do other exotic things to make this work. Shouldn't have to.
Thats a long ass motherboard you got there Jason711.

It looks like the GPU as PPU makes you give up the least to get the most.

I specifically picked out the motherboard I have now because of slot layout and EAX3.0 capability waiting to install a PPU. I have 1 empty pci slot that something could actually be plugged in. I have 1 pci-e 1x slot. If I decided I wanted EAX 5.0 X-Fi so I could have the latest and greatest sound experience, now my one useable pci slot is gone. I still have pci-e 1x slot. But their not making PPU for pci-e until LATER.

Bottom line is I have the latest and greatest and if I want PPU I have to CHOOSE what not to get. I want the latest sound, SLI graphics & physics processing. GPU as PPU would let me do that. Do I need 100 fps in FEAR with everything turned on? Or would I be just as happy with 60fps and some physics processing??
 
I could be wrong, but I think that a dedicated PPU would be far more efficient than a reprogrammed GPU to act as a PPU. Dedicated PPU's are designed from the ground up just to do that task, but GPUs are not (even though they can do it).

I like the idea of a GPU being used as a PPU, but I see a few disadvantages:

1) SLI currently works only with the same video card. This means that if you want to have a 7900GTX for a video card (not exactly cheap imho), then you must use a 7900GTX for a PPU. This is far more expensive than a proposed $150 to $250 dedicated PPU. In addition, the latter will perform better.

2) Suppose you did get a 7900GTX SLI solution. Push ahead a year and a half, and lets assume your video card is good enough for your needs due to less of a load on video cards because of PPUs. Your other 7900GTX acting as a PPU, however, is chugging along to keep up with new game physics. If SLI only works with the same exact video card, you MUST upgrade both your video card and PPU in order to get a physics boost.

3) Nvidia and ATI will undoubtedly make sacrifices in terms of GPU performance in order to boost their PPU implementation. I don't like this idea - you are essentially becoming a secondary but specialized CPU to do complex tasks rather them divy them up to superior specialized components. I forsee a slowing in terms of video card performance to accomodate PPU performance, even when factoring in the gain of the PPU by taking load off the GPU.

4) Load balancing for the GPU and PPU in a single video card solution will probably result in more stuttering and lower framerates. I'd like to have a very good system to make use of wasted GPU clock cycles for the PPU, but I forsee problems implementing it. Think about it...the system will contstantly need to check for empty clock cycles and use the odds and ends to process physics. It takes calculations to do just this - calculations that could be used to render graphiscs. Even though this is done very quickly, I doubt this could be implemented efficiently.

If you had a dedicated PPU on a separate card, you wouldn't have this issue. And, as said before, it would be cheaper (assuming the projected prices for dedicated PPU's are correct).

Just my $0.02.
 
well, i guess i dont have dual slot coolers.. and im not using SLI atm either.

its the ep-8na sli.
 
There are already two pretty heavy game engines promising to support Ageia PhysX.

Epic. UE3 engine.

Next gen Gamebryo engine. Current generation is being used in Civ4 and ES4: Oblivion and whatever else.

edit: and if you look at their homepage you'll see, Mythic, Ritual, Ubisoft, and others. That's quite a bit of support. It will be an interesting couple of years to say the least. :D
 
if its the wrong direction, how should they go about implementing a more correct or real 3d enviroment? wish for it?
 
Jason711 said:
if its the wrong direction, how should they go about implementing a more correct or real 3d enviroment? wish for it?
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Multi core processors?
 
eurin said:
Multi core processors?
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This has already been discussed in several publications.

CPU's are very serial in nature. Physics, like Graphics need parallel processing.

However; you may be on to something with the pixie dust theory...
 
Jason711 said:
if its the wrong direction, how should they go about implementing a more correct or real 3d enviroment? wish for it?
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Ok, you buy a 300$ PPU then.... Im going to save my money for hardware that will boost my entire system's performance vs. a few select games. :rolleyes:
 
ok, ill buy my $300 ppu with my 7900GT (eventually i will have two for sli) and you can just have your two 7900gtx's...

hmm... i think i spent less.
 
Jason711 said:
ok, ill buy my $300 ppu with my 7900GT (eventually i will have two for sli) and you can just have your two 7900gtx's...

hmm... i think i spent less.
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Hmm.... you spent less on a ppu that won't help you in most games. Good job!
 
Considering this is an enthusiate website, why would you even compromise..

SLI or 1 GPU + 1 PPU..

why wouldn't you want to go for the gusto?

SLI + PPU..

no compromise..

this goes to that whole thing, what would you rather have?

runnign at higher res/higher AA-AF in SLI..

or nonSLI and better physics?
 
oh, i see... you magically know how many games will end up supporting the ppu... OMG. i feel so foolish now!
 
Man Progression sucks. Look how many games used SM3.0 back in 2004 man it should never have been made. THe PPU should just be droped becaused nothing supports unrealesed Hardware.
 
Firebat said:
Do you think F.E.A.R supports the PPU? Last time i checked no......
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I don't think ANY current games support it. The amount of physics presently in games is limited enough to allow the CPU to do the calculations.

What the new PPU proposes is far beyond the physics we have in games today.

The major developers are only promising, or claiming support in future game engines. Unreal Engine 3 and the next gen Gamebryo, and others....
 
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