Ageia PhysX processor demos - are they really that impressive?

the october issue of CPU has a good article on it... they're saying itll have as big an impact on gaming as the gpu/vpu did, the only thing is getting game developers to take advantage of it
 
The thing about PhysX is that it dedicates itself to handling all the physics processing of a game engine. If you look at a game that includes Havok physics, you'll notice that only placed objects are moveable. Other things, like grenade shrapnel, sparks, water, metal etc, are all animated and not purely physics based. Something like PhysX makes it possible for realtime object stress, like something heavy bending a thin piece of metal, or popping a balloon filled with water, and the material reacting to something hitting it.

Game physics are an important part of immersion, which can make or break the (re)playability of a game. Some things aggravate me, like predefined death animations, unreactive objects in a map (wtf?) while others are reactive, sprite animations (ugh), and collision detection (godawful).

Personally, I think physics are more important than graphics, in terms of immersion. Currently, there are obviously limits on photorealistic graphics, and the hardware that can support that kind of realism isn't here yet. Physics are the next step in making a game that much more believeable in the way the environment you play in behaves much more like a real world situation that could conceivably happen (yeah right)
 
I watched a demo of it on G4. I was impressed at first, but its when they demo it and turn it off so you can see the difference. Delicious.

I didnt read your link but the guy that had it said $249-$300 for it.
 
qbackin said:
I watched a demo of it on G4. I was impressed at first, but its when they demo it and turn it off so you can see the difference. Delicious.

I didnt read your link but the guy that had it said $249-$300 for it.
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I was rather hoping they would be about $200. :(
 
D3v01D said:
I was rather hoping they would be about $200. :(
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Yeah tell me about it. If it isnt enough to buy the latest and greatest already. But sounds like you wont have to upgrade the physics card tho. Just buy it once to go along with all the new kick ass cards to come :cool:

My wallet is crying.
 
I seem to remember the first time [H] posted about them on the news page they said it would be more like $130...
 
It probably won't be too long, it it takes off, before vid card manufacturers buy rights to the engine and start building them on chip for the cards. Pci-e has more than enough bandwidth to handle this. A cool setup too would be something like sli where one slot does graphics and the other slot handles the physics side of things.
 
defakto said:
It probably won't be too long, it it takes off, before vid card manufacturers buy rights to the engine and start building them on chip for the cards. Pci-e has more than enough bandwidth to handle this. A cool setup too would be something like sli where one slot does graphics and the other slot handles the physics side of things.
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AGEIA already announced that their cards are capable of running in parallel--in other words, you can "SLI" 2 cards to get double the performance.
ATi has already played around with performing more general processing tasks on their GPU's. Physics is possible, though apparently still not up to the caliber of PhysX's PPU.
Because ATi's cards can *apparently* handle physics, you can *apparently* slam a x1300 into your system, and it will run physics while your main video card handles graphics.
 
I'd love to see stuff like that then. Physics in a game really does put it on a whole new level.
 
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