Tuesday, July 24th 2007
Ageia's Answer To John Carmack
John Carmack's statement last week that he is "not a believer in dedicated PPUs" and that "multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general" was the reason for Ageia's Dan Forster answer in a recent Bit-tech article. Forster was quoted saying:
Source:
Bit-Tech
When it comes to the CPU side, dual-core, quad-core, whatever then the main problem is threading. How are you ever going to thread the two things together? It's all about timing, when the physic effect hits then how is the second core going to time it and cooperate? At the moment, there's not a single game that supports multi-threading even at a basic level. I reckon we're years out with that and it's already been about for two years. The games that are being developed now only use it a bit, for A.I. and so on where they don't need extreme threading.
36 Comments on Ageia's Answer To John Carmack
2nd- The price, as you said goto ebay and buy a used 1 great idea BUT the fact that this card which is supposedly so great is already being sold by people who have it has to make me wonder why.. If it was such an incredible piece of hardware why would they not want to keep it? Could it possibly be that they realized it's not all that impressive or did they realize they made a mistake buying that instead of a decent graphics card, afterall as someone had already mentioned with those extra particles and such thats alot more rendering.. The current newer games already tax most of the mid and lower ranged graphics cards to the max so why don't we make them work even harder by adding MORE.. Not everybody has an unlimited budget to buy or build the most powerful rig or to buy the most powerful graphics card some of us have to wait until the newest toy hits the market so we can afford the last generation's top dog when the prices drop..
3rd- I was not saying FEAR is the greatest in anyway what I was saying is that FEAR is a good example of the begining of physics in a game, physics which can be done with just your cpu and if your fortunate enough to have a duel or quad core then the physics will be easy to handle.. The effects though don't stop at just FEAR though there are many many games which have physics in them en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_using_physics_engines yes I know not all of these are PC games but many are and
more than 3/4's DON'T require a special card to get the benefit from it..
Have you ever heard of Havok? They incorporate physics on the software end and in many instances you would be hardpressed to say which is better Havok's software physics or Ageia's hardware..
You probably think I am against this card but the truth is I am not I just don't see a need for it with so many games already having their own physics built in, think about it why exactly do you think games are so large now that they need to be put on multiple cd's or dvd's? It is not just for the graphics or the size of the levels or maps or whatever, it is because they DO have physics already and THAT takes up alot of space
1) Price
2) Limited Game Support
IF every game in the market supported it i would had bought it without thinking about the high price.
www.firingsquad.com/features/ageia_physx_response/
Physics cards are also obsolete. Since the release of vista the processors aren't handling the graphics load. The processor is now open for physics processing and when you have some extra cores...well ...i rather have the open pci slot for more air flow than a 150 dollar paper weight.
Listen buddy, people don't want to spend $150 on something that is going to do nothing but sit and collect dust 99% of the time.