PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

[Sir. MatDef]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

Why the hell was this moved? It was right were it was supposed to be.

[redearedslider]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

Why the hell was this moved? It was right were it was supposed to be.

probably someone who wants to come to tech centre, but isnt gonna buy this ppu :P

[SciFiMan]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

The CPU is a bottleneck in a number of games. It is currently doing physics, AI, game coordination, and the general system stuff. Most people don't have a $800 CPU. The PPU will absolutely revolutionize PC gaming. Really. And once we get to DirectX 10 cards, where they either are or aren't compliant and there aren't different code paths in games for different vendors, then we'll see the dawn of a new era. If may take a year or more for developers to learn how to make use of this new power though.

Think about some quick obvious things a PPU will allow:
1 - Arti will make big craters in the ground instead of just scorch marks and momentary dust. On Karkand you can bomb the river crossing so it becomes impassible except to APC's. But then your team can't cross easily either so have to think strategically.
2 - Two engi's in tanks are killing your team. Can't kill them, then shoot the crane and let it crash down on the tanks instead.
3 - Can't get those snipers on the roof? Just knock down the whole bloody building.
4 - All doors and walls are destructible so if you're backed into a corner, just blast through and exit the building or climb to any roof or floor.
5 - Crash your APC into building columns to knock the whole building down, blocking an entire road or two until the round ends.
6 - Blow out window glass and players nearby take damage from the glass shards.
7 - Spec Ops blows up a dam causing a small flood downstream, or it washes away a key bridge.
8 - Gernade blows a wheel off a Jeep but unfortuneately the wheel rolls down the road and kills your squad leader.
9 - AT guy ran out of ammo. Push a boulder down to cause a rock slide destroying that tank.
10 - Annoyed by that sniper on the watertower? Tank blows a hole in it, washing enemies away. Sniper respawns and climbs into the new dark hole for safer shooting.

Now think about the other games you play where anything goes physics can really give you freedom to solve problems, and create new problems for your teammates if you didn't think about consequences before hand. I promise you all, it will be a whole new gaming world 2 years from now! Don't judge it now from a couple snippets of game demo. 60 developers are working on over 100 games for the PhysX card. And with this card taking some load off the CPU, it leaves more horsepower for better AI, and I can get by with an older CPU before needing to upgrade.

[Flanker]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

Thats all great and stuff, but the game has to be DESIGNED for that. You can't just take a PhysX card and put it in your system and have the crane crash. It has to be built into the game. There aren't 100 games coming out like you described above, they simply have PhysX SUPPORT. That means that a few objects here and there will react with realistic Physics, not everything in the game.

If that doesn't happen, then Agiea can kiss itself bye bye. I agree that eventually, a PPU will become as necessary as a GPU, but if there isn't a MAGNIFICENT game out there that takes advantage of the PhysX card MAGINIFICENTLY (thats where UT2K7 comes in, hopefully), then it won't be the Ageia PhysX PPU that makes it happen.

[lonegunm4n]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

The CPU is a bottleneck in a number of games. It is currently doing physics, AI, game coordination, and the general system stuff. Most people don't have a $800 CPU.

Then explain this to me, why is it I can run BF2 on max settings, on a slightly overclocked AMD Athlon 64 3200+? I have no problems running GRAW, etc. either. When I overclock it even higher, it's pointless to do so, because I am only gaining 10 fps. I also only paid $142 for my CPU.

By the by, who says you need an $800 CPU? You see the article about the $130 CPU at 4.1 Ghz? I've seen people spend only $150 on a CPU like mine and get FX-53 performance.

The CPU CAN be a bottleneck, but that's mostly when the CPU itself is an old one. In the case of the Physx card and modern day gamers, the CPU isn't the bottleneck.

[Tenshi]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

Then explain this to me, why is it I can run BF2 on max settings...

K...lets say we make a game...

First...the world. We model a world and import it to our game engine. We flick a switch and thansk to DirectX the GPU kicks in and throws all the geometry around at 100 fps.

We need to navigate. We add a mouse-look. Reads the mouse and turns that into a rotation for the camera. Easy...still 100fps.

Next movement logic...this gets a bit tricky cos its all about vectors but its not that difficult. We just take the keyboard values make some vectors, add them togetherm multiply that by a speed vector. This takes a little power so maybe we lose a few fps but not much. If we were making a racing game this would be alot harder.

So we can fly around a world...great. But we need to limit the movement.

so...Collision detection rears its ugly head. Weve got a bunch of visible geometry that we need to test for collision. Trouble is theres so much geometry that our CPU (whatever it is) isnt powerful enough. So we make some vastly simplified geometry thats invisible and test that for collisions. Suddenly our frame rate dies. maybe 50fps

So maybe we do some clever stuff so that we arent testing for everyting at once...maybe we have spheres of influence...we need to program that so we cut down the amount of collision testing...fps go up to maybe 60 or 70...after a few weeks of programing at least.

We havent even started on AI or nice physics stuff.

Then we get this free API from ageia and most of the above is included and hardware accelerated.

The point im trying to make is that physics is more than fluid and cloth...and current physics in games isnt at all realistic because the CPU cant do it. Physics simulations have to run at incredible refresh rates...like thousands...to be precise.

Future PPUs will have improve architectures in the same way GPUs do...and within a few years will make current physics look like a joke.

[lonegunm4n]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

*shrugs* then try and explain to me the fact that when I overclock my CPU, I only see a little boost in performance?

Your talking from the game developer's POV, I am talking from the gamer's POV.

If I want physics in my game, I'll wait until Nvidia releases it's Physics for SLi owners.

[Tenshi]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

nVidia have conned people into buying dual GPUs that deliver little performance increase. Now theyre cashing in on the uncertainty surrounding physics to make people think there second GPU is useful as a physics unit. At best its adequate.

SLI physics cant do user interaction, the physics data never leaves the GPU.

How powerful will the GPU have to be to deliver something it isnt designed to do? Most of the features you paid for (fast antialiasing, z-buffer compression, mipmapping, anisotropy, auto shadow culling etc etc) will be useless for phsyics.

If I want physics in my game,

this is a misconception alot of people have...you dont have a choice..all games have physics and always have. Even tetris.

Physics isnt a layer of icing (like sli physics is), its a fundamental component in all games.

[lonegunm4n]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

you taking what I want out of context. You knew gamer's mean more physics than the ones already offered.

Like someone said before, what's the point of this physc card if it creates such a drop in performance? I certainly won't be buying one to get cooler explosions in games, only to suffer a massive drop in FPS.

[SciFiMan]

Re: PhysX (Cellfactor) videos updated.P

But it isn't for cooler explosions. It's for much better ones that effect your environment and force you to dynamically change your play every minute. Right now artillery raises dust and makes some scorch marks on the ground. There should be 10 foot deep holes there instead, and change depending on if it's cement, dirt, or soft sand. Why can't I move the wheelbarrel on Wake? If a bomb makes a near miss by me I should be alive but blown off my feet by the shockwave. It's up to developers to use their imaginations, and then make as much as possible interactive so the players can be very creative. And performance issues are just program code to be tweaked. I suspect that video drivers will also need updates as physics evolves. Just give it time before you dismiss the entire concept.

But it will all depend on what the programmers put into the game as they think about things like game play and balance- that is, a small tree may still halt a 70-ton main battle tank if the developer needs to make sure a tank can't go down a certain direction. For balance, AA now doesn't immediately down a jet or copter as it would IRL. We'll just have to see what the coders do with it. I know a lot of you will need to see it before you believe it. I predict that in 2007 a game will come out of nowhere, like Far Cry did, and blow everyone away with spectacular physics we've never seen before. I can't wait.

Performance can greatly depend on the game. I sure you've read many game reviews, and some of then say it's CPU bound, or that most of the heavy lifting gets done on the GPU. And then we have games where either ATI or nVidia has better performance. Of course some developers code with a particular vendor in mind. And until we get DirectX 10, some cards vary in their implementation of DirectX features. It's much more complex than saying that a 3.8MHz should be better than a 3.2MHz because they might be dead even all other things being equal. It all depends.

*shrugs* then try and explain to me the fact that when I overclock my CPU, I only see a little boost in performance? .....