Tuesday, April 15th 2008
NVIDIA CUDA PhysX Engine Almost Complete
Although NVIDIA bought AGEIA Technologies only two months ago (on February 13, 2008), the GeForce creator informed recently that the conversion of AGEIA's PhysX API engine to CUDA programming language that interfaces with the GPUs is almost complete. Upong completeion of CUDA, owners of GeForce 8 and 9 series graphics cards will be able to play PhysX-enabled games without the need of an additional AGEIA PhysX PCI card. The big question here is, how much will this PhysX addition worse the frame rate in games. Well for now we only know that NVIDIA showed off a particle demo at its recent analysts day that was apparently similar to Intel's Nehalem physics demo from IDF 2008. For the record, the Nehalem demo managed 50,000 - 60,000 particles at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), while NVIDIA's demo on a GeForce 9800 card achieved the same level of particles at an amazing 300 fps, quite a boost. NVIDIA's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) in theory can double this score to top 600 fps. Manju Hegde, co-founder and former CEO of AGEIA added that in-game physics will be the "second biggest thing" in 2008.
Source:
TG Daily
53 Comments on NVIDIA CUDA PhysX Engine Almost Complete
i hope Ati is making note of this!
Anyway, on a more serious note :p
I thought AGEIA ran on computers without an Ageia PCI card anyway??
And I'm sure we will all have something similar be it through CPU or GPU, once game developers start needing something more than a quad core to do their physics calculations...
Software mode uses cpu cycles, and isn't as powerful as using the dedicated card.
PhsyX card replaced by PhysX on GPU + GPU = one less processor designed for this kind of stuff = even bigger slowdown.
eek. I dont like that.
So go SLI/crossfire? Well guess what, a second GPU is more expensive than a physx card. And it should be too... all that extra hardware for driving a VDU out, large RAM requirements for texture and frame buffers, etc. No need for that on a plain FPU/PhysX solution.
I'll be interested to see the benchmarks on this. At this point I'm not convinced. Better for nvidia to have designed a chipset/mainboard with an open socket that would allow a PLCC drop-in with the Physx engine on it, just like the FPU's (387, 487) of yesteryear. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_leaded_chip_carrier
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80387
I'll probably get one of these :D FTW :D = the power of PhysX acceleration ;)
damn just checked it seems you can get the cuida drivers/sdk for XP but no vista i cant wait
specialy doest increas fps in crysis or anny other havoc pysics game
Nehalem Fire demo www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36726/135/
riddle me this.
but, with nVidia spearheading their own project, and backed with their TWIMTBP campaign, ATI would get their ass handed to them currently in the physics arena.
Although, I think ATI GPUs are much better suited for physics processing than nVidia's are. ATI has even demonstrated in the past a dominance when they were showcasing their 2+1 and 1+1 Crossfire GPU/PPU implimentations. I still think they would demonstrate that same dominance today - except, nVidia now has their own physics engine, and can rally support for it quicker in games through their campaign than ATI could. Unless we see both manufacturer's designing around a 3rd party physics engine (i.e. Havok), competition will be severelly one-sided.
And on top of that - further development of physics in game like this is still iffy. Sure, having a GPU manufacturer like nVidia supporting and pushing game devs to further implimentation is great for the whole - what if there are major game devs who refuse to fall prey to nVidia and instead go with someone elses engine?
If ATI does jump aboard this market upon wind of this from the nVidia camp - it wouldn't surprise me to see ATI partner with Intel and their physics engine.
It could also go over like it did last time and just dead end all together.
But, this is all in theory on my part as well - can't say for sure until we actually see the technology hitting our motherboards, y'know?