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Bfg + Ageia

knothead34 said:
i read asus was supporting this technology first. ive heard prices between 200-250 and were suppose to be out around christmas.
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Yes ASUS is the original board partner, now BFG has signed on board as well, which is great news because the more companies that adopt this technology the more likely it is to succeed.

Oh and for everyone saying they will get it when some game uses it, just wait for Unreal 3. Unreal 3 will have support for PhysX, the developers love the thing. That will be the "killer ap" that makes people want to get a PPU if nothing comes along sooner.
 
The initial problem with this card will be dev support. An object either has physical properties or it doesn't. You can't just change the level of physics like you can with graphics.
Therefore devs are either going to need to support this card or not, or somehow manage to compromise.

Here's hoping it does well.
 
Erasmus354 said:
Yes ASUS is the original board partner, now BFG has signed on board as well, which is great news because the more companies that adopt this technology the more likely it is to succeed.

Oh and for everyone saying they will get it when some game uses it, just wait for Unreal 3. Unreal 3 will have support for PhysX, the developers love the thing. That will be the "killer ap" that makes people want to get a PPU if nothing comes along sooner.
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Ugh...U3 seems to be adding support for heaps of new tech. Probably sponsor more new hardware purchases than Doom did...:D
 
This card reminds me a lot of the original Voodoo cards. for one it's a add-in card it's going to add a physics to your graphics (though driver an API.)

What happen with the voodoo is that old games started to add support though a patch to the game. this gave it a boost. game became amazing looking and run so much faster. I have the same hopes for this card it's going to add more power to physics portions of games making it faster and look even more realistic and amazing. we could very well see HL2, Doom3 and other high-end games add support if this card if it becomes very popular like the voodoo once was...

You have to look at it this way. if a peace of hardware sells very well games will want to add support for it, as it will drive more sales for that game...

*original price for a voodoo card was 199.99 and they could not make them fast enough...
 
Zardoz said:
*original price for a voodoo card was 199.99 and they could not make them fast enough...
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/me wishes nVidia would put GLIDE on their cards (they own 3Dfx now, if IIRC)

And so this isnt a totaly pointless post, I'd pay around $150 for it; $200 is pushing it, but I would probobly end up buying it anyway; Anythign much higher than $200 and I'll be waiting for the price to come down.
 
I wonder if the resident BFG guy can give us an idea on the price, if he's not under an NDA. *nudge* *nudge*

Edit: I think we need a "physics cards" section for the [H]ard forum now :p
 
theres no way i would buy this with the way games are today. maybe afew years from now if most games use a heavy amount of physics but even then i would rather just have the option of turning off physics and not having to buy the card.
 
Nidhogg said:
theres no way i would buy this with the way games are today. maybe afew years from now if most games use a heavy amount of physics but even then i would rather just have the option of turning off physics and not having to buy the card.
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thats the chicken and the egg

one as to come frist and in the PC world you need the hardware be for ppl will use it
like every one is saying this is just like when 3D cards came out
 
Hell, I will buy one. I am a tech geek, if its new, badass, possibly overkill. I will get it. I do like saying, "pfft, of course I have one of those, got it when it first came out". I am actually suprised at all the naysayers a tech forum has about every piece of new hardware, let alone new tech.

I like the idea of 1 graphics card and 1 physics card a lot more than 2 identicle graphics cards.

Besides. Its been a long ass time since I have used any of my expansion slots. I remember lamenting having a board that only had 5 slots (all easilly filled). Now I cannot think of a use for any of the slots.
 
DocFaustus said:
Hell, I will buy one. I am a tech geek, if its new, badass, possibly overkill. I will get it. I do like saying, "pfft, of course I have one of those, got it when it first came out". I am actually suprised at all the naysayers a tech forum has about every piece of new hardware, let alone new tech.

I like the idea of 1 graphics card and 1 physics card a lot more than 2 identicle graphics cards.

Besides. Its been a long ass time since I have used any of my expansion slots. I remember lamenting having a board that only had 5 slots (all easilly filled). Now I cannot think of a use for any of the slots.
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LMAO
Best thing in this thread. Brings back memories *wipes tears from eyes*
 
I agree with the above statement. I am all for new tech. It really has been a while since there was truly something new to add to my PC that wasn't just an upgrade to another product. 5 years from now we will be remembering our first physics card. As well as the simple fact that I will want one just to say I have the newest and coolest. If we buy it, the games will come! (I hope)
 
My prediction on this is that once all the naysayers see one in action, and all the people claiming they'd never pay more then 100 bucks, actually see what this thing can do, they will be ready to whip out their wallets. This thing will be revolutionary if it's supported properly. And it looks like they have a TON of support in the works.

I also think with Physics, and X-Fi, that a fast single core machine is going to continue to be faster at gaming then Dual cores of lesser clock speed, even with dual core support. I mean, once you've got Sound, (X-Fi) Graphics (Graphics Card) and Physics (Ageia) what is there that's left to do that would actually Push 2 cores? not much.

And I love all you folks that say it will free up Dual-Core for AI. AI's not where it's at today because a lack of power. It's there because a lack of WetWare (cool word for ai software). AI has been in a stale, unchanging state for years. Honestly, it's not a hardware limitation people. There's a website out there that has the most sophisticated AI known to man, these people spent years developing this guy, and turned it into a bot that you can chat with, I don't know the website off hand, but im sure someone here does, it's mildly amusing if your drunk, but it's pathetic and this is the best we can do, these arnt game programers, but people that have dedicated their lives to AI.

Regards,
Mike
 
One thing that makes me less optimistic is the claim that future game that support this tech will have thousands of more objects reacting correctly to physical laws. The one thing that causes a headache is that you actually also need a powerful graphics card that can handle these thousand objects in the first place and at a good frame rate.

And what about the addional traffic between the PPU and the graphics card, that won´t be a small one either if there are "thousands" of objects. I smell a new bottleneck and new (performance) problems. It would be a shame if PPU-accelerated games would actually run slower than games without it.

So personally I´ll wait until I see this new tech working nicely and flawlessy in future games before I buy into this. I definitly wish AGEIA the best and that this works out nicely but I´m not all too optimistic unless M$ adds support for this tech into DirectX/WGF, then it should have a decent future because the support in many future games would be almost given.
 
Russ said:
they are saying that it is supposed to do 32,000 objects in its best version. A while ago they were saying that the initial ones would only do like 8k or something. Thats still thousands more than any CPU can do right now.

I think that graphics will take an enourmous leap forward with this innovation, even if it is crippled when it fir comes out. This isn't like the first graphics card, AGEIA is leaping straight into huge gains right from the start.

edit:

QFT
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I thought it was 40,000.

And graphics has nothing to do with physics BTW.

I figure the only one's who'll be able to take advantage of this are the l33t of the l33t. Only a pc with atleast a dual 7800gtx would be able to display all those objects and still have enough GPU power left over to actually draw the game world and characters.
 
Aieget said:
The initial problem with this card will be dev support. An object either has physical properties or it doesn't. You can't just change the level of physics like you can with graphics.
Therefore devs are either going to need to support this card or not, or somehow manage to compromise.

Here's hoping it does well.
Click to expand...

This is true, when 3d acceleration appeared, there were no changes in gameplay, you just got higher resolutions, better textures and faster framerates. Nothing in gameplay changed. You can't do that with physics, how obstacles behave and weapons fire are a major part of gameplay.
 
Elios said:
funny thing is Ageia is founded by a good chunk of the guys from 3Dfx
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Wrong. I would check my facts before spreading useless crap on the internet, if I were you.

http://www.ageia.com/about_founders.html

My friend worked with them at Celox....they developed the firmware for high end switches and whatnot here in St Louis. They actually asked him to come with them when they formed Ageia, but he had a family and had to get a solid, stable job instead of working for a startup. He workes for APC now.
 
jebo_4jc said:
Wrong. I would check my facts before spreading useless crap on the internet, if I were you.

http://www.ageia.com/about_founders.html

My friend worked with them at Celox....they developed the firmware for high end switches and whatnot here in St Louis. They actually asked him to come with them when they formed Ageia, but he had a family and had to get a solid, stable job instead of working for a startup. He workes for APC now.
Click to expand...

heh i read in a few places a bunch of the guys there were from 3dfx
maybe not the founders though
 
U3, Ghost Recon 2, and Age of Empires 3 are some of the big games that have been announced to support PhysX. It remains to be seen how exactly a PPU system and a non-PPU system will play these games, but I think the list of titles that will be using the PhysX API is growing. Not to mention that PS3 and XBox 360 have announced "support" for the tech, though I don't exactly know what that means. I will probably be buying one for a lot of reasons. It's good for gaming for us to buy them. The more PPU's that are sold, the faster (and better) games come out to support the tech. I'm also excited to see if the PPU can resurrect my 3.0c, which is falling behind. Think about this: didn't Carmack or Newell or somebody say the console's CPU's are pretty weak by today's standards....similar to a 2.8GHz P4 or something? Well if that's the case, then any game that comes out for the consoles will run just fine on my 3.0 with a PPU.
 
The (H) Front Page said:
AGEIA Acquires Meqon Research AB:
AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced that it has acquired Meqon Research AB, a physics development company based in Sweden. Known for its forward-looking features and multi-platform support, Meqon recently earned international acclaim in the games world for its physics technology incorporated in 3D Realms’ Duke Nukem Forever and Saber Interactive’s TimeShift.
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Are you serious? How can physics be incorporated into a title that, AFAIK, doesn't exist?:rolleyes:
Obviously, I'm joking, but still, the fact remains that none of us have been impressed with DNF's physics.....probably......because......um.......it's not released yet!
 
Sly said:
I thought it was 40,000.

And graphics has nothing to do with physics BTW.

I figure the only one's who'll be able to take advantage of this are the l33t of the l33t. Only a pc with atleast a dual 7800gtx would be able to display all those objects and still have enough GPU power left over to actually draw the game world and characters.
Click to expand...

Not true.
Game like FarCry show us that you can fill a screen with objects(trees, planst, rocks, water ect.) and still show it.
You don't understand what it is that the PPU-chips does do you?
It dosn't "add" extra objects, but what it does it calcualte the physics for the objects on screen.
And with geometry instancing you could seend 10.000 balls down a mountain calculating each individual trajectory and their interaction, and get < 1 FPS without an PPU and get > 30FPS with a PPU.

Perhaps you should see for youself what the PPU is all about before you spread anymore misunderstandings ;)

AGEIA physX Technology Videos

Terra - I wan't one...now! :D
 
Terra said:
Not true.
Game like FarCry show us that you can fill a screen with objects(trees, planst, rocks, water ect.) and still show it.
You don't understand what it is that the PPU-chips does do you?
It dosn't "add" extra objects, but what it does it calcualte the physics for the objects on screen.
And with geometry instancing you could seend 10.000 balls down a mountain calculating each individual trajectory and their interaction, and get < 1 FPS without an PPU and get > 30FPS with a PPU.

Perhaps you should see for youself what the PPU is all about before you spread anymore misunderstandings ;)

AGEIA physX Technology Videos

Terra - I wan't one...now! :D
Click to expand...

Seen a couple, still downloading the rest. Gonna take a while to download tho, dial-up sucks.

What's the GPU requirement to view farcry decently? And that's with a static environment.

Gonna spend a few days downloading the rest of the vids, the first two i've seen wasn't much, maybe the rest will change my mind.

Geometry instancing is a good way to take advantage of it tho.
 
I'm definately looking forward to completely deformable/DESTROYABLE!! environments. This should take care of that and make concerns about having too many particles a thing of the past. I just wonder if it will be pci or pci-e and how much it will cost. I won't pay $300, mabey $100-150, $200 if it's absolutely amazing. Epic is behind them so expect unreal 3 to fully support this tech. If unreal is behind them then you know it's going to be pretty big considering all of the game engines based on unreal tech.
 
It's PCI. It will be somewhere between $200-250.
 
Physics is something that games could really use. It would be worth the $300, and would be a much better investment then, say, a second GPU for SLI. I personally would rather play ~30FPS with physics than play ~50FPS without physics. Just think of this: Right now, if you fire a bullet at someone behind a wall through a window in an FPS, all that happens is the bullet goes in a straight line an hits the target, the texture on the window changes to one of a broken window, and the bullet bounces off the wall or goes through it. With PhysX, the bullet would smash through the window, the individual shards of glass will all scatter around the room as they would in real life, possible injuring the shooter, the bullet would slow down, and if shot at an angle, change direction slightly. The bullet would then be affected by the wind on it's way to the target, and the bullet's velocity, size, and material would determine whether or not it would go through the wall that the target was standing behind, and still have enough velocity left to either kill the target or only inflict a superfical wound.

Another really cool thing that PhysX could do is make everything much more destructable. For example, everytime you fired a bullet through a building, the building's structural integrity would deteriorate slightly. If you fired enough bullets, then a player large enough climbed onto the top of the building, it would collapse under the weight..
 
Omikron Karma will also support the PhysX cards, in addition to titles such as Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport, Dogtag, the new Rise of Nations, and the Warhammer MMORPG. The physics for the next City of Villians game are being developed using Ageia software, which will hopefully mean support for the hardware. This is in addition to titles already mentioned in this thread, such as U3, and titles using that engine; arcade boards, too. Also, developer programs such as Softimage and 3Ds Max are going to incorporate support into their new releases, and many X360 and PS3 developers have stated that they are using Ageia software to develope their console games. These are big titles and big names in the industry; this stuff is going to trickle down... Imagine what physics acceleration could do for RTS titles and games such as Burnout, not to mention sports games (no more wonky tackles, ball physics, etc).

I think that Ageia is making the right connections (BFG, Sony, Microsoft, Gungho, etc), and putting their name in the right places, to have a real impact on the hardware scene in the next year or so. Also, as was made apparent by the acquisition of Megon Research, they are willing to purchase any potential competition and use it to further their own products. If MS sets them up with DX, they're almost assured success.
 
I'm not too excited about this card at all anymore. At QCon, the rep stated the 1st gen card will only be for liquids and particles, and any other physics (clothing, hair, grass, muscles, etc) will be in later revisions.

Cormack's thoughts on the card where not really negative (as far as I can remember) but he did say that it would not help performance in game. Grass as an example, to make it wave in the wind and crunch under your feet it would have to be made of many more polys then it is now.
 
t3mp said:
I'm not too excited about this card at all anymore. At QCon, the rep stated the 1st gen card will only be for liquids and particles, and any other physics (clothing, hair, grass, muscles, etc) will be in later revisions.

Cormack's thoughts on the card where not really negative (as far as I can remember) but he did say that it would not help performance in game. Grass as an example, to make it wave in the wind and crunch under your feet it would have to be made of many more polys then it is now.
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I'm not sure if it's the later revisions of the cards that are needed for advanced physics as much as it is more adoption. The problem is this: we're playing ghost recon 3 online. I have a PPU, and you don't. In my game, I can shoot a building, and a hole will break through the wall. Since you don't have the PPU, your game can't do the same thing. How do developers handle this situation? *Thought: maybe separate servers for physics-enhanced games?*. Anyway, the main obstacle between games and uber-realistic physics for a while will be that only a small proportion of us will have PPU's, so programmers will have to program physics both for PPU systems and non-PPU systems. Therefore, the enhancements will be mainly limited to grass, water, and clothing.
 
HOCP4ME said:
Physics is something that games could really use. It would be worth the $300, and would be a much better investment then, say, a second GPU for SLI. I personally would rather play ~30FPS with physics than play ~50FPS without physics. Just think of this: Right now, if you fire a bullet at someone behind a wall through a window in an FPS, all that happens is the bullet goes in a straight line an hits the target, the texture on the window changes to one of a broken window, and the bullet bounces off the wall or goes through it. With PhysX, the bullet would smash through the window, the individual shards of glass will all scatter around the room as they would in real life, possible injuring the shooter, the bullet would slow down, and if shot at an angle, change direction slightly. The bullet would then be affected by the wind on it's way to the target, and the bullet's velocity, size, and material would determine whether or not it would go through the wall that the target was standing behind, and still have enough velocity left to either kill the target or only inflict a superfical wound.

Another really cool thing that PhysX could do is make everything much more destructable. For example, everytime you fired a bullet through a building, the building's structural integrity would deteriorate slightly. If you fired enough bullets, then a player large enough climbed onto the top of the building, it would collapse under the weight..
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And if you were to play that same game on a machine without a PPU. Do you realize how much the gameplay would change?
 
Here you guys go, more info from the [H] front page:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article.php?aid=229

Looks like the "not as good as the best we've planned it to become" rumors are true. But the fact is that games won't USE all the things they want it to right away. I think I'll get one preorder or something, then when I upgrade my computer in a year or two to a 65nm M2 or something I'll get the full version.

And it confirms that it will be a $250-300 PCI card. So you AGP guys can get it too.

And I don't understand your statement that "physics has nothing to do with graphics" but "nothing but dual 7800GTX's will run this"...

He mentioned that they might have to make the physics a server thing for multiplayer.

Even if it is only single player, I am still excited about the single player.

He directly said that there will be 3 games out before the end of the yhear that will support the physx and that's why they are releasing it then.

Also Unreal 3 should be insane.

edit:

O yea, thanks for the move, mod. (Whoever you may be.) I wasn't sure what this counted as so that's why it was in general hardware.
 
be interesting to see if they survive. As CPU's get more powerful and multicored, i'll be surprised if someone doesnt kill this whole physx idea in the future and just let the CPU take it on like its been doing.

Basically the hole idea, from what i understand, is to give realtime destruction and motion without bogging down the CPU or GPU/VPU with calculations. Games already use real time physics which can be seen in games like HL2 and FEAR all over the place and thats all CPU work.

Its literally going to take a few years for this to get wide spread adoption if at all. And honostly from every demo i'v seen, its nothing that they cant offload to CPU's. So unless they get massively impressive with completely destructible environments or something, assuming they get that powerful and the developers put in the time, i really dont see these things becoming too popular. While it sounds cool, no one wants to go buy another card or risk being obsolete.

So, hope they survive, if they do i expect amazing stuff, i also want to see their prices stay resonable. Nothing higher then announced, preferably 250.
 
I dont know , I guess I will believe it once they are out. The CEO of Ageia made a great speech at Quakecon , alot of visionary stuff going on.

I am not quite sold on this yet and while the company has all of the best intentions , I feel that the standalone cards will fail. I dont think physics accelerators are a bad idea at all , the price is just too steep for a add in card. I think you will see these standard on the actual graphics cards themselves within the next 3-4 years.
 
I'd like them to bring this to PCI Express as fast as possible. If their target market is the high rollers with SLI and Crossfire setups, then these people have PCI Express slots to spare and a tight shortage on regular PCI slots. (I have three open Express slots. Adding the physics card means yanking the Audigy ZS and going to onboard sound. A 4x slot should be able to run this card just fine.)
 
the whole point is that CPUs can't do within a thousandth of the stuff that a PPU is gonna be.
 
what i would like to see is ageia's hardware to support other physics engines like havok, releasing strain form the cpu.

for one it would make the supported number of games increase ten fold.
and limit CPU bottle necks on some systems.

i cant see a reason why havok wouldnt want ageia to support their engine as it would make games using their engine more desirable and allow developers to add more interactivity.

on the other hand ageia would prefer developers to use thier SDK so in a sense its catch 22.., but if 3rd party support was available i personally beleive the cards would have a better chance of becoming common place.
 
Asian Dub Foundation said:
ah.. more money to burn... how im gonna afford this and the X FI.. :p
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I don't have enough PCI slots for this and the X Fi, and TV tuner :(
 
kirbyrj said:
I don't have enough PCI slots for this and the X Fi, and TV tuner :(
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Yeah, I really hope they release a PCI-E X4 version eventually because I also can't spare another PCI slot on my DFI board. I probably won't buy one anyway, but if games really start to take advantage of it like I described in my previous post I will. That's probably years away though, a game like that would have to require a PPU as the gameplay would change too much for someone without one.
 
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