How fast is your PPU?

C

Cr@zZy

Limp Gawd
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"We saw some cool demos done in software on a laptop of what this card can do. It can operate with 32000 particles/rigid bodies or should I say bones? [You should, Fudo, you should. Ed.] When we talk about fluids, such cards can handle up to 50000 rigid bones. A CPU can do a couple hundred at the most."

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21648
 
this is from the inqwell. http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21648

Age of physics processing units dawns

Games Developers Conference 2005 AGEIA makes games look more real


By Fuad Abazovic in San Francisco: Monday 07 March 2005, 23:50

WE FLEW half the way around the globe to see a cool new marchitecture and we haven't been disappointed. Yet.
After decades of listening about Central Processing Units, years of listening about Graphic Processing Units and millimoments of listening about audio processing units, it is time to learn the new term. It's time to start talking about physics processing units (PPUs).

I have a feeling that we will be talking much more about such PPUs in the near future as these are going to change the way computer games look like. The company behind this marchitecture is called AGEIA and is a "Fabless Company" with lots of investors around, including mighty Taiwanese giant TSMC and the almost almighty Bank'o'America. Here in San Francisco's Games Developer Conference the firm revealed its chip called symbolically PhysX. It’s the world first Physics Processing Unit (PPU), they reckon. These guys have taped out the chip and made a final product and reference card design ready as we write.

The answer is actually an add in card with either PCI Express or a PCI interface with up to 128MB of dedicated GDDR 3 memory that will take over all physics in the games. We saw some cool demos done in software on a laptop of what this card can do. It can operate with 32000 particles/rigid bodies or should I say bones? [You should, Fudo, you should. Ed.] When we talk about fluids, such cards can handle up to 50000 rigid bones. A CPU can do a couple hundred at the most.

The card operates under 25W (Watts) so the company is still not sure whether it needs an external power connector or not. The chip itself has 125 million transistors and it's quite a large piece of silicon but that's no probbo for TSMC. The chip and card designs are ready, so the company only needs retailers, OEMs and notebook manufacturers to embrace the marchitecture and start releasing designs. There will be cards for notebooks to boost gaming physics on notebooks as well.

The company said it's following the Nvidia business model as it wants to produce the chips and sell them to OEMs and manufacturers that will later make boards based on the design. Or "partners", as the INQUIRER describes such souls.

Companies such as Epic are actually very interested in the marchitecture and we are told that at least 15 significant games are going to be released using this marchitecture. We are told to look for the games by the end of the year and that's the timing for the so called "time to market".

We saw some cool demos where the company demonstrated "liquid fluids" with many "bones" and you can see the "lava" and "water" stimulations that look much better than ever before. It looks more real and much more alive.

Such cards can give some life to collision detection and can for example make a character go through grass and move every single grass while walking, adding a higher lever of realism into the scene than ever before. Looks cool I have to say. What need for grass?

We also saw some liquid simulations, where you could see blood spilled more realistically than ever before. It's especially good when you blow up a house into the smallest infinitesimal pieces, or bricks and mortar as the INQ calls them. It actually looks out of this world. I cannot imagine this in a war game. It will blow your minds. It almost looks like Bosnia and Herzegovina 12 years back.

Big guys like Gabe Novell, the developer of Half Life 2, asked for more physics and Jon Carmak of Doom 3 wanted the same. The industry likes the marchitecture and developers want to programme for it. The application programming interface (API) is the well known Novadek physics engine and AGEIA actually owns this famous physics engine company. The big publishers have worked on the titles for the last 14 months and you will see some of the releases very soon.

You can expect to see such cards in shops by the end of the year, and the company will release the things when enough developers finish their titles.µ





What scares me about about some new pu is that i'm paying uasually 280 for a cpu, 399 for a GPU, and soon i have to pay ??? for a PPU with 128mb of GDDR3. Dont get me wrong I like being the coolest nerd I know and all with top of the line hardware but theres got to be a point where I draw a line. What I would love to take place would be that they lisense the technology out to Nvidia, ATI, and who ever and make it part of the video card for about 70 bucks more maybe! i'd like to hear some ideas on what you like and dislike on this thing called a PPU. pettybone


PS. my spelling is pure crap FYI
 
Looks promising to me. They'll probably up the price of this until it becomes old technology.

To me I am excited about this because this seems fast. I might hold my money on a new video card until this comes out
 
interesting but i dunno if i wanna have to buy a add-on card just to experience additional game effects. i mean what will be next? an add-on card for super realistic lighting and shadows? add-on card for crazy AI in enemies? add-on card for super duper hooters on female models that giggle and bounce? lol
 
Yeah, really another component that people will be tempted to buy...Just put the darn thing into the graphics cards...
 
SWEET!... what happens if you OC it?? :D ... will the grass move faster? lol

ahh.. my pc parts dream list...

dual core a64.... check
2GB of ultra low latency ram ....check
SLI board... check
2x 6800GT's.... check
and now... a PPU add-in card! YES! :cool:
 
sounds liek a fantastic idea, but won't the PCI bus and overall architecture of having this sort of distribution over a PC 's motherboard limit its capabilities?
 
possibly with regular PCI... PCI-E has plenty of bandwidth to kick around.

maybe now they will be able to dedicate the processor to strictly AI.

i think its is very cool news though... finally, something new! :)
 
This brings into question the whole CPU architecture. It seems archaic by comparison to the GPU's and now PPU's out there doesnt it? These things are orders of magnitude faster than CPU's. I read a link from here once saying that a 5700's equivalent CPU would be a 10GHz P4. I wonder what its IBM POWER equivalent would be.
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
sounds liek a fantastic idea, but won't the PCI bus and overall architecture of having this sort of distribution over a PC 's motherboard limit its capabilities?
Click to expand...

The card is doing the physics completely internally, so it will only need continous, but small, updates from the CPU, and then it will be returning results which I would guess will also be fairly small because they are only the results of the calculations, and not any of the interim results. So considering the peak number of bones, 50k.....

If each "bone" result is 64bits in length (which is pretty damn precise) then that is 3.2 million bits, or 400KB. Since the PCI bus can handle 127MB a second, that would mean it could handle about 317 "bone" updates/second. Obviously other stuff would be using the bus, but even if only 1/3rd of the bus was available that would still be enough to maintain 100 updates/second.

Obviously my guess about the size of the data returned could be off, but even at 128bits you would still get 50 updates a second.. plenty for most games, and chances are you won't be using the peak of 50k "bones" continously anyway so that will help raise the updates/second number anyway.
 
Mister E said:
add-on card for super duper hooters on female models that giggle and bounce? lol
Click to expand...
we all would buy it....and you know it :D
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
This brings into question the whole CPU architecture. It seems archaic by comparison to the GPU's and now PPU's out there doesnt it? These things are orders of magnitude faster than CPU's. I read a link from here once saying that a 5700's equivalent CPU would be a 10GHz P4. I wonder what its IBM POWER equivalent would be.
Click to expand...

The CPU's may look questionable, until you realize that they do everything, while the gpu only specializes in polygons. It's the same reason why games run faster on consoles with worse hardware. The games were made specifically for the console and don't work anywhere else. Try running superpi on that 5700.
 
You can download it at here . It's a program for calculating values of pi used for testing a processor's speed. I got 38 max with the system in the sig.
 
Mister E said:
interesting but i dunno if i wanna have to buy a add-on card just to experience additional game effects. i mean what will be next? an add-on card for super realistic lighting and shadows? add-on card for crazy AI in enemies? add-on card for super duper hooters on female models that giggle and bounce? lol
Click to expand...

You're right. For that matter, we shouldn't have FPU's in our processors (they used to be separate units, btw). Why bother when the CPU can emulate them? Also, I'm tired of having to buy a video card for better graphics. Onboard video should be enough for everyone. Then there are hard drives. Why should I spend all that money for data storage when I can just use lots of floppies?
 
ThomasE66 said:
You're right. For that matter, we shouldn't have FPU's in our processors (they used to be separate units, btw). Why bother when the CPU can emulate them? Also, I'm tired of having to buy a video card for better graphics. Onboard video should be enough for everyone. Then there are hard drives. Why should I spend all that money for data storage when I can just use lots of floppies?
Click to expand...

and all this RAM... OMG! GET IT AWAY! :D
 
that's all fine and dandy but I don't think it's necessary. I'd rather see an A.I. processing unit than this.. I think the cpu is doing well enough.. besides after all these processors are built for this and that, what will there be left for the cpu to process?
 
The CPU will just be a clearing house for data going to other, more specialized processors. :eek:
 
I vaguely remember, way back in the day, 3dfx was talking about building a physics processor into the VSA100 chip that powered the Voodoo4s and 5s.

Does anyone else remember that?

It does suck, though, having to pay so much more money to play games these days.

I'm looking to upgrade my whole box from a Socket 754 to a Socket 939...but in order to be "future proof", have upgrade options, and have an upgrade that is fast enough to even come close to justifying the pricetag, I'm going to end up having to pay almost $1000. This really bothers me a great deal.
 
well eventually physics (geometry) will move over to the GPU, we'll start to see the first signs of this with Shader Model 4.0 (i.e. WGF) in Longhorn

it will be interesting to see though if the industry adopts this add in board physics chip solution (no way NVIDIA or ATI will not want to create faster geometry engines on their chips)

ultimately what we want in games is true dynamic displacement mapping in real time, but you are going to need a whole lot of geometry processing power

the CPU is no where fast enough, it does hold back physics right now

but video card chips will also advance, the generation of cards built for longhorn and SM 4.0 (WGF) should be very interesting

i'd rather see this seperate physics engine on the video card PCB though
 
haha wondered where it went brent.
I am really looking forward to this, in a way because its new technology, but how much is it going to cost? :confused: I dont want to be paying another $300+ for a PPU lol, even tho i probably would anyway.
 
CastleBravo said:
The CPU will just be a clearing house for data going to other, more specialized processors. :eek:
Click to expand...

Sounds great!

I wonder if this will be obviated by multi-core CPUs before it even gets off the ground. Can't you have one core handle physics, another AI, another etc. etc.?
 
serbiaNem said:
You can download it at here . It's a program for calculating values of pi used for testing a processor's speed. I got 38 max with the system in the sig.
Click to expand...
ok i see your thinking..you sayed try running this on a 5700..and this program does CPU...good time... :D
 
Brent_Justice said:
...

i'd rather see this seperate physics engine on the video card PCB though
Click to expand...

Realistically, it has to happen that way, us [H] types may be willing to shell out for that kind of gizmology, and I could see consoles loving the tech, but for Joe Mainstream it'd be like "What? Another what for doing what now? How much? I'll stick with my X-Box next thanks", and the developers aren't going to develop two versions of each game for PC, one for regular folks and one epic version for PPUpeeps (especially when even developing one PC version isn't that appealing anymore), they'll ignore the PPU in droves, or, at best code in some token offloading of existing physics for marginal fps benefits, but we won't see any real games doing massive high detail physics for a looooong time.

This tech will die on it's feet in standalone form (unless it works out really cheap).
 
3D Video Accelerator required
Physics Accelerator required

where does it end?

AI Accelerator required?


AI Accelerator required (DirectNeuralNet v20 compatible)?

As Todd Sweeney said (paraphrase here) "Firing chairs and tables around is fun, but hardly pushing physics".

Surely matrix mathematics and large quantities of data is what graphics cards do? Add the physics on to the 3D gubbins.
 
ColinR said:
3D Video Accelerator required
Physics Accelerator required

where does it end?

AI Accelerator required?


AI Accelerator required (DirectNeuralNet v20 compatible)?

As Todd Sweeney said (paraphrase here) "Firing chairs and tables around is fun, but hardly pushing physics".

Surely matrix mathematics and large quantities of data is what graphics cards do? Add the physics on to the 3D gubbins.
Click to expand...


Yeah, I was really pissed when I had to buy a hard drive for games. They used to run off of one floppy. Then I got pissed when I had to buy a VGA card; CGA wasn't cutting it anymore. Of course it was such a ripoff when they moved games to the Win32 platform so I couldn't run them in DOS or OS/2 anymore....
 
serbiaNem said:
The CPU's may look questionable, until you realize that they do everything, while the gpu only specializes in polygons. It's the same reason why games run faster on consoles with worse hardware. The games were made specifically for the console and don't work anywhere else. Try running superpi on that 5700.
Click to expand...

I heard that they were programming a language to execute threads in GPU cores...
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
I heard that they were programming a language to execute threads in GPU cores...
Click to expand...

It's not a matter of having a language, it's a matter of having support for multiple threads in the GPU itself. Something akin to the TSS (Task State Segment) on x86 processors. Yes, it's a logical evolution of GPU's that will make coding complex scenes perhaps a bit easier on the coder.
 
I saw this yesterday was going to post something but assumed some one else will / already had. Anyhow, seeing how this will be a game related hardware device, that will likely need speed bumps with every generation of games, get wide spread adoption from the userbase, and be taken under the developers wings etc it will have to be intergrated into the graphics card. If it werent I believe it would go the way of creatives eax sound tech, a gimicky hardware specific feature few games support.
 
ThomasE66 said:
It's not a matter of having a language, it's a matter of having support for multiple threads in the GPU itself. Something akin to the TSS (Task State Segment) on x86 processors. Yes, it's a logical evolution of GPU's that will make coding complex scenes perhaps a bit easier on the coder.
Click to expand...

Wouldn't running multiple threads through a GPU be something similar to running massive simulations on supercomputers that have thousands of processors?
 
BossNoodleKaboodle said:
Wouldn't running multiple threads through a GPU be something similar to running massive simulations on supercomputers that have thousands of processors?
Click to expand...

Yep. Actually a GPU is very much like the individual processors in a traditional vector supercomputer.
 
Since you seem to know a lot about it, and I also wish to learn about it, what is the difference between a vector processor and the normal desktop processor architectures? Do you have any good resources for this sort of low-level hardware information that I could peruse?
 
I know it seems like a hassle to buy this PPU thing, what i would like to see is all these techs combined into 1 card some day.

so at the mo we got:

Graphics Card
Ray-Tracing Cards (yes another card, that u lot probly aint heard of ;) )
Physics Card

it would probably take atleast 2Billion Transistors to get all these tech's onto 1 chip, which will be in about 10 years when carbon nanotubes are commercially viable, i hope anyway :D
 
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