guys wanna see the PPU in action? (you will be impressed)

hmm it says Requested Video Ready, Please Save Below..

but i can't get it to save or play?

you have a better link?

-nm- i got it, you click View Now (hiRes) not Download
 
Actually I jumped the gun. Cell factor is mind blowing for about twenty seconds..then it starts to get repetitive.

Plus is this off-topic? Should I delete this post?

hmmm...a ppu or another 7900gt in sli?
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From what I understand Physics on a GPU cannot effect the enviroment. It just looks pretty. So this would be the "real deal" on a PPU.
 
I think it will be much more interesting to see fully destructable environments...when the destructability really adds to the game play...like being able to shoot holes in walles etc...
 
This is really just the tip of the iceberg. We will see better and better things as these cards mature :)
 
Sharky974 said:
From what I understand Physics on a GPU cannot effect the enviroment. It just looks pretty. So this would be the "real deal" on a PPU.
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No... why would it be any different than the Ageia ppu? They're both just an extra processor on the pci bus that uses special drivers and software to do thier thing. That said, a dedicated ppu should be tons faster than a gpu doing something it wasn't really made to do. But on the otherhand, we haven't seen how a ppu works or even what its architecture looks like, it might not be much different than a gpu.
 
sorry for my ignorance but what is this for? What is PPU, is it a another vid card or an add on card or what?
 
Dapperdan said:
sorry for my ignorance but what is this for? What is PPU, is it a another vid card or an add on card or what?
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Yes, another $250 toy that looks to enable explosions/particle/liquid effects never seen as possible with the CPU alone.

I'll be waiting for the $100 version around the time games that fully utilize it come out. Nice video though.
 
Dapperdan said:
sorry for my ignorance but what is this for? What is PPU, is it a another vid card or an add on card or what?
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PPU= Physics Processing Unit add-on card.

GPU= Graphics Processing Unit vid-card

CPU= Central Processing Unit self-explanatory...
 
jcll2002 said:
yeah, its basically people throwing grenades at a boat load of barrels
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of course it's repetitive, this is just a demo showcasing what PPU can do. it looks awesome too
 
bazylik said:
of course it's repetitive, this is just a demo showcasing what PPU can do. it looks awesome too
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Yeah, I have to say that I'm really liking this new demo. It is however the first actual DEMO we've seen that doesn't look like shit (all that stupid liquid shit being poured on a car can only be seen so many times, and that damn airplane hangar...).

My interest is piqued....though I'll remain cautious as this isn't proof of it's potential by any means.
 
If you read some articles on it you can find that nvidia themselves have stated their solution isnt as good and is basically just eye candy. The difference with the dedicated PPU is that it can track objects physical interactions and how those objects affect the environment; collision detection and things like that, while the nvidia solution can not. Basically with a ppu you can have something blow up into a million bits and track how those bits affect things i.e. shrapnel, with nvidia you can have it blow up and look pretty but it wont affect gameplay.
 
I am unimpressed. There is nothing that the source engine can not do, they just decided to put an assload of boxes in there. I was hopeing for durability, destroyable landscapes, things cracking and shattering etc...
 
tskiller said:
I am unimpressed. There is nothing that the source engine can not do, they just decided to put an assload of boxes in there. I was hopeing for durability, destroyable landscapes, things cracking and shattering etc...
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I would like to see the Source-engine pull off something like that? :)
I seldom held more than one object with the grav-gun in HL2...
And I never saw over 10 physics "htreads" beeing run at the same time in HL2...

Terra - I say poor CPU that would have to calculate the phycis for that many objects...
 
Terra - I say poor CPU that would have to calculate the phycis for that many objects...
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i guaruntee that the physics processor on that board is less powerfull then my dual core opteron. Games just need to be written to use what they have available to them, whether it be a second core, just writing it better, or writing for some silly pci card.
 
It may be nice..but is this really worth an extra $250 every 6 months (or whatever there estimated cycle is)?
 
tskiller, general purpose cpu's are just that, general purpose, and they have nowhere near the amount of floating point performance a dedicated ppu or gpu has. If your cpu is so powerful how come it isnt doing your graphics also? Also why is AMD considering placing math co-processors in their opteron boxes to compete with cell?

Ageia's estimated cycle is IIRC 2-4 years depending; they want a relatively stable development platform (think Creative with audigys). If ati and nvidia get seriously involved though who knows what will happen.
 
Yep, it won't even be close, purely a "not in the know" comment. Nv is throwing there hat in the ring because the calculations can be similar to what a gpu does. A cpu keeping up is a funny joke.

I remember when I first learned my shiny new cpus were jack of all trades, master of none. You don't want to believe, but the truth remains.
 
tskiller said:
i guaruntee that the physics processor on that board is less powerfull then my dual core opteron.
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I wouldn't take that to the bank if I where you...
At least not when it conserns the preformance in specialized physics calculations...a CPU is general purphase...not specialized...
If that where there case, don't you think Havock would have opted for that solution? ;)

Terra...
 
on their website they say they will have driver updates to address future needs of the card as far as new technology in physics needs for games.

Of course eventually they will run into physical limitations of the card they are initially offering and will upgrade the hardware to accomodate that.

Who knows how long their first card will last until it is "obsolete". They are a relatively new company and we have not seen how they will implement new drivers and how often we will need to upgrade to their latest, greatest card.

I think soon these will be integrated into future video cards and may not require an additional card to be functional, since they are already in "cahoots" with BFG and probably other vid card manufacturers. The Ageia Physx is just a chip basically, that can be integrated into other components.

I will wait until I see actual improvements in gameplay that take advantage of this technology. But they are cool :)
 
polive said:
on their website they say they will have driver updates to address future needs of the card as far as new technology in physics needs for games.

Of course eventually they will run into physical limitations of the card they are initially offering and will upgrade the hardware to accomodate that.

Who knows how long their first card will last until it is "obsolete". They are a relatively new company and we have not seen how they will implement new drivers and how often we will need to upgrade to their latest, greatest card.

I think soon these will be integrated into future video cards and may not require an additional card to be functional, since they are already in "cahoots" with BFG and probably other vid card manufacturers. The Ageia Physx is just a chip basically, that can be integrated into other components.

I will wait until I see actual improvements in gameplay that take advantage of this technology. But they are cool :)
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I heard their card is capable of transfering Terabits of data and performance increases will come from driver updates that refine it to make it even more capable. We will just have to see... I remember Creative making the same statement about the SB Live. And do you really want another thing on your GPU that gets really hot? especially when its product life cycle is probably gonna be 4x longer. They already stated that they are not going by the Nvidia/ATI model of releasing something new every 6-8 months.
 
Killa_2327 said:
It may be nice..but is this really worth an extra $250 every 6 months (or whatever there estimated cycle is)?
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I'm going to assume that this is going to be more along the lines of a sound card life cycle than a video card one.

If you have a sound card that is 4 years old, it will still function perfectly fine with modern day games, you might get better performance and more features with the newest sound card, but it still does the job it was intended to do.
 
From: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=225&type=expert&pid=3

PPU Life Cycle

One interesting aspect that came up during my discussions was the idea of a life cycle or product cycle for a PPU. In the world of GPUs, we are pretty used to seeing a new flagship product every 6-8 months from both NVIDIA and ATI. Because graphics is quite a bit more scalable than physics, this hasn’t really been an issue. But for physics programming that may require a separate physics card, the idea of having new cards out every 6 months can be gut wrenching. Would you like to be REQUIRED to buy a new PPU every 6 months for the latest titles to run on your system? Surely not.

AGEIA was adamant that this would not be the case for the foreseeable future. In fact, they have already seen the opposite occurring; upgraded firmware and drivers for the PPU has opened up new features and options to programmers on the same hardware. Cloth simulation is the first example of this as it wasn’t ready initially when the SDK went out to software developers but has since been perfected and added into physics engine, without a need for a hardware upgrade. AGEIA told me they feel that this will continue to happen through 2006 and into 2007 as the power of the PPU is being less utilized until the CPU and GPU can keep up.

Of course, that can’t happen indefinitely and when I asked specifically about new hardware with faster physics processing, they didn’t have much to say other than it would come, but not for "at least another year." My impression was that it would be even longer than that but of course no one would commit to anything. It is pretty obvious though that a market like this requires a certain stability that the GPU and CPU realms don’t need.
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...and from: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1941621,00.asp

The 2.4 driver and development kit was just released to developers this week, adding a host of small new features like software cloth simulation (including tearing), hardware accelerated joints, and more. In the middle of the year, version 2.5 will enable hardware-accelerated cloth, auto-detection and use of the PhysX hardware, and fluid surface generation in hardware. It will also improve the performance and scale of a number of dynamic bodies through optimizations. Beyond that release, the company is striving to enable soft bodies ("squishy" objects that try to retain their shape), height-field-based fluid simulation that interacts with rigid bodies, and two-way cloth and rigid body interaction.
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EDIT: From: http://physx.ageia.com/faqs.html#14

Do I have to buy new hardware every year just to get new physics features?

No. The powerful, yet flexible, AGEIA PhysX processor is designed to enable future enhancements via software. This makes a PhysX accelerator a great investment because gamers will get not only new PhysX-enabled games now and in the future, but the new features that AGEIA delivers via regular driver updates will run on the hardware that’s installed in PCs today.
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the thing I'm wondering though, is how would it be possible to play a game that supports a physics card to the max at acceptable framerates on a comp without one. With graphics you can lower the greaphical quality as graphical quality doesn't effect gameplay much. With physics its not like you can lower the accuracy of the physics, as that would make the gameplay different, not to mention **** up online multiplayer.
 
Prism123 said:
the thing I'm wondering though, is how would it be possible to play a game that supports a physics card to the max at acceptable framerates on a comp without one. With graphics you can lower the greaphical quality as graphical quality doesn't effect gameplay much. With physics its not like you can lower the accuracy of the physics, as that would make the gameplay different, not to mention **** up online multiplayer.
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I was thinking that too.
 
Here's an arguement for the people that say it can all be done on the CPU....

If you do it on the CPU, you're taking cycles away from the game. Sure, your Opteron can do the calc's, but what's left for games!? I'm sure once dual cores are utilized, the need for a PPU will increase. Video used to be done on the CPU, and it looked like ass. When we got our dedicated GPU, it looked a lot better. And the games got better.

The CPU could do software rendering, but it looks like shit. So, we have the GPU. Onboard sound is OK, but the X-Fi sounds a hell of a lot better. Games without a PPU are good, but add a PPU and adds an element not seen before.

I see the PPU as a step in the evolution of games.

Bare with me for a second; as games evolve, so does the hardware. Imagine a "holodeck" of sorts, or virtual reality. You shoot a can... What happens to the can? Does it get a black blob on it (without PPU) or does it act like it would in the real world? It all comes down to the immersion factor. That's what I'm going for.

To the naysayers: you are probably the gamers that run at low eye candy for the optimum FPS. I enjoy the eye candy, and the realism. Some games I love it, some it doesn't really matter. I really like it to look great. I'd sacrifice a few frames for a better looking game. That's me. Probably not you. With physics, it just adds another element to the game. I welcome it whole heartedly. I'd be an early adopter. I'll bring the prices down for ya! ;)

Mandy
 
chiablo said:
I'm going to assume that this is going to be more along the lines of a sound card life cycle than a video card one.

If you have a sound card that is 4 years old, it will still function perfectly fine with modern day games, you might get better performance and more features with the newest sound card, but it still does the job it was intended to do.
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i hope its like sound cards. my audigy 2 zs i bought 2 years ago for $100 is more than i even need now.
 
It's like cheese you can listen to outside!









:p thanks for the link!! I can't wait for the PPU's to become availible.
 
Prism123 said:
the thing I'm wondering though, is how would it be possible to play a game that supports a physics card to the max at acceptable framerates on a comp without one. With graphics you can lower the greaphical quality as graphical quality doesn't effect gameplay much. With physics its not like you can lower the accuracy of the physics, as that would make the gameplay different, not to mention **** up online multiplayer.
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I think most game developers will the Ageia card as a reference point so it will offload all the physics calculations on it but not over flood it to where the video card or cpu will be utilized. Developers arn't going to go insane with this thing and start throwing 20,000 characters on a screen swimming in a pool while a hurricane is blowing through. So there is no reason to turn down the physics because it wont even tax any other component on your system.
 
when i was watching the cell factor demo, all i could think was that the PPU will be the golden child of the Star Wars game universe. anyone for realistic physics jedi force manipulation?
 
SatinSpiral said:
anyone for realistic physics jedi force manipulation?
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Since when are Jedi powers realistic? I mean, sign me up! but I haven't seen courses in that yet... What can a Jedi move? How fast can he move it? How far away can he move it from?

 
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