Quad core means no physics card needed

I just downloaded the latest version of the PhysX SDK the other day, and toyed around with it a bit.
The froggy sample runs at 22-25 fps on my E6600 with 3 GB of memory.
Sadly there are no fps visible in the Youtube movie, but by the looks of it, it runs well faster than 25 fps on hardware.

Ofcourse the biggest advantage of the PPU can't be seen here... In this sample we're using the full CPU power for physics alone. In an actual game, we'll be needing a lot of CPU-power for all sorts of other things, so the effective physics performance would be much lower... The PPU is dedicated to physics, so it doesn't care what the rest of the system does, it will always have 100% of its time to spend on physics.
 
The management team behind this physics card never did its basic homework.
Hopeless.

What home work?

Not Like this?
They put a Hardware physics accelerator on market with SDK.
Then it's up to the dev's. Where the first get the SDK about a year before release of PPU.
But wait the need a lot of time and most of them don't use it because it not easy mergable with a online focused gameplay mechanics. So to get something on fast they go for effectphysics. GRAW.

3DFX G-card don't have this online dilema so would have a smoother ride. did had strong popular competition in there early day's..

Or this homework?
For very fast succes or be able to make you happy. Ageia would be forced to be to setup
like 5 Highprofile gamedeveloper teams to spread the risk, with a large budged 100mil to make class AAA title making extensive use of PhysX. They would have startered in 2001/2002 to make a great game. To realy push it to be released wenn PPU hit the streets.

Like Nintendo Plastation supports there consoles with inhouse made games.
Not the way 3DFX did. Hardware Voodoo and SDK glide. No inhouse games, but had a smooth road ahead.

Thrid party game. who are more focused on there own risk and feature set focus. Has soem hurdles to break. Now online play keep Gameplay use away. Keeping effectPhysX over wich is just mo eyecandy just looks. With mostly average games.

Well and on top of that ageia got to soon announce competition with is still very popular with already large fanbase. The GPU firms cooperating with havok.

This is not ageia fault it's how market works. Slow and unvergiving and there can be done more with a milljard with support of inhouse big games then with a few millions to get just the hardware and sdk out. To do it right and take a lot off risk away.

The risky way take some time. But then again its a risk.
 
It's built on a damn 130nm process, if they switched to a 65mn process, took out the ram, and simplified the PCB into a shorter, half-height PCB that can sell for $50 than this might catch on.
 
It's built on a damn 130nm process, if they switched to a 65mn process, took out the ram, and simplified the PCB into a shorter, half-height PCB that can sell for $50 than this might catch on.

Economies of scale.
65 nm is very expensive, so you have to make a lot of chips at a time to get the prices down.
For example, even a Sound Blaster Audigy (probably the most popular addon-soundcard?) is built on 130 nm. Competing products are sometimes built on 250 nm or more.

I'm sure they're smart enough to pick the process that gives them the best price.
Now, if it catches on, we may see 90 nm or even 65 nm PPUs in the future, at much lower prices... but they have to start somewhere.
I hope they can pull it off, but if even an enthousiast-site such as this one is not open to this technology, things are looking grim.
I'm guilty aswell, I've not bought one myself, because I have no use for it. Nevertheless I'd like to see this technology prevail.
Now that there's also a GP programming kit coming out, I may actually change my mind. The cards aren't THAT expensive. Nice toys.
 
Economies of scale.
65 nm is very expensive, so you have to make a lot of chips at a time to get the prices down.
For example, even a Sound Blaster Audigy (probably the most popular addon-soundcard?) is built on 130 nm. Competing products are sometimes built on 250 nm or more.

I'm sure they're smart enough to pick the process that gives them the best price.
Now, if it catches on, we may see 90 nm or even 65 nm PPUs in the future, at much lower prices... but they have to start somewhere.
I hope they can pull it off, but if even an enthousiast-site such as this one is not open to this technology, things are looking grim.
I'm guilty aswell, I've not bought one myself, because I have no use for it. Nevertheless I'd like to see this technology prevail.
Now that there's also a GP programming kit coming out, I may actually change my mind. The cards aren't THAT expensive. Nice toys.

That's true, if games do start using these cards, I might think about buying one. ONLY if they actually make a difference though ;)

I could probably think about it though because I doubt I'll ever have much need for SLI, since the best video card I can afford will probably usually hold me over until the next upgrade, and usually I would sell my old card and get a new one. So (my next cpu/mobo upgrade should probably have 2 pci-e slots), and Phys-X has caught on, I might consider it. Especially if it's lower than the asking price right now, it might even be a little tempting...
 
I wouldn't be surprised if NVIDIA and ATI weren't working pretty hard to get GPU based physics processing off the ground. That way they can sell you a third or even a fourth high end video card.

2kw PSU's here we come!

2kw psu's? Hardly. Maybe in the EU, but not in the states. Your comment might be tongue-in-cheek, but a lot of people might be thinking what you are and it wouldn't bode well.
 
Personally I what physics with Ghost Recon Advance Warfigther 2. If Ageia can release a PCI-E version in the next couple of weeks I'll buy. If not then its quad cord for the future as I say good bye for now to Ageia. If Ageia's card is capable of more then another thread on a CPU I'll just wait for HardOCP to run the tests.

I see your point and it's well taken. I'd rather drop that extra $200 on the overall cost of a quad core instead of a dedicated physics card.
 
2kw psu's? Hardly. Maybe in the EU, but not in the states. Your comment might be tongue-in-cheek, but a lot of people might be thinking what you are and it wouldn't bode well.

It was said in a joking manner but I didn't really think that I'd be using PSU's over 1kw just a few years ago. Now 1kw PSU's are becoming more and more common.
 
It was said in a joking manner but I didn't really think that I'd be using PSU's over 1kw just a few years ago. Now 1kw PSU's are becoming more and more common.

But necessary? You need a LOT of crap in your computer to necessitate 1kw of power. Some people do need it though....
 
But necessary? You need a LOT of crap in your computer to necessitate 1kw of power. Some people do need it though....

I've never seen a desktop machine that truly needed that kind of power and frankly, my machine doesn't even need it. However I believe in having more than I need just in case and I don't want a PSU running at 75% or higher load capacity all the time. Not having a strong enough PSU bit me in the ass once and I'll never do it again.
 
But necessary? You need a LOT of crap in your computer to necessitate 1kw of power. Some people do need it though....

Most of it is not necessary. I recently read somewhere about a guy who actually metered out what his super-box actually uses and it's nowhere near what his 1kW can supply. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the 1kW hype is nothing more than epenis envy and the typical marketing hash (cue up fight club) about getting you to buy something you really don't need.
 
Most of it is not necessary. I recently read somewhere about a guy who actually metered out what his super-box actually uses and it's nowhere near what his 1kW can supply. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the 1kW hype is nothing more than epenis envy and the typical marketing hash (cue up fight club) about getting you to buy something you really don't need.

As I just posted my system draws no where near what my power supply can output. 430watts maximum load and far less at idle. Still it's not about needing a 1Kw PSU necessarily but rather a quality PSU that handles the load easily. I could use a 500watt PSU to power my rig or even a 600watt unit, but they wouldn't last more than a month running more than 80% of their total output 100% of the time. They would fail quickly. My PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 can get the job done also, but I grabbed the Thermaltake ToughPower for the future. When 8pin PCIe video cards start coming out (besides the HD 2900XT) and so fourth, I wanted to be ready.

I was actually going to grab an Enermax Galaxy 1000watt but I picked up the Thermaltake ToughPower 1200 for about the same price so it was one of those "why the hell not?" type of things.
 
I can relate.
When I upgraded to an Athlon 1400 a few years ago, I found myself in the funny situation that it was hard to get motherboards, coolers and PSUs that were able to handle the thing, and not die on me shortly after.
With that system I ended up buying another cooler because the one the store originally advised (Thermaltake Superorb) when I asked them to give me the best they had, turned out to be incredibly noisy, and only barely kept the CPU cool... So I found that the Noisecontrol Silverado worked great and was very quiet, although it was expensive. I ordered it.
The first PSU just burnt out... then I tried to find another one, but anything over 300w was hard to find.
The board I originally got with the CPU at that store was an Abit KT7A. It never ran stable... When I started looking into it, the board was only rated up to 1200 MHz, and it simply couldn't handle the power that my CPU required (back then there was no separate 12v connector for CPUs yet). The store should never have sold me that board to go with that CPU.
Eventually I got that board replaced aswell, by an MSI K7T Turbo. That one worked fine...

But damn was it hell to get the right components together. Trial-and-error too, back then. A lot of parts just weren't in stock with most stores, so I had to figure out what I needed and order it somewhere. Previously I would just buy a case, board and CPU, drop it in and it worked, and I'd been building and modding PCs since the days of the XT.

I suppose it's still pretty much the same today, if you're going to run a fast quadcore system with SLI or CrossFire. Especially if you also want to overclock. But at least 750w+ PSUs are getting available now, and aren't that expensive anymore.
 
I can relate.
When I upgraded to an Athlon 1400 a few years ago, I found myself in the funny situation that it was hard to get motherboards, coolers and PSUs that were able to handle the thing, and not die on me shortly after.
With that system I ended up buying another cooler because the one the store originally advised (Thermaltake Superorb) when I asked them to give me the best they had, turned out to be incredibly noisy, and only barely kept the CPU cool... So I found that the Noisecontrol Silverado worked great and was very quiet, although it was expensive. I ordered it.
The first PSU just burnt out... then I tried to find another one, but anything over 300w was hard to find.
The board I originally got with the CPU at that store was an Abit KT7A. It never ran stable... When I started looking into it, the board was only rated up to 1200 MHz, and it simply couldn't handle the power that my CPU required (back then there was no separate 12v connector for CPUs yet). The store should never have sold me that board to go with that CPU.
Eventually I got that board replaced aswell, by an MSI K7T Turbo. That one worked fine...

But damn was it hell to get the right components together. Trial-and-error too, back then. A lot of parts just weren't in stock with most stores, so I had to figure out what I needed and order it somewhere. Previously I would just buy a case, board and CPU, drop it in and it worked, and I'd been building and modding PCs since the days of the XT.

I suppose it's still pretty much the same today, if you're going to run a fast quadcore system with SLI or CrossFire. Especially if you also want to overclock. But at least 750w+ PSUs are getting available now, and aren't that expensive anymore.

I had a KT7A-RAID and it was a pile of shit. I replaced it with an ASUS A7V-133A and all my problems went away.
 
As I just posted my system draws no where near what my power supply can output. 430watts maximum load and far less at idle. Still it's not about needing a 1Kw PSU necessarily but rather a quality PSU that handles the load easily. I could use a 500watt PSU to power my rig or even a 600watt unit, but they wouldn't last more than a month running more than 80% of their total output 100% of the time. They would fail quickly.

Do the failure rates show that? I think you could hardly be allowed to call your power supply a 600W PSU if it's not capable of supplying even 480w continuously. In-fact(though I'll have to check the box for my PSU, perhaps my brother's as well), don't the manufacturers specify the maximum duty cycle the PSU is capable of?


Edit: That's not to say running at the bleeding edge is what I suggest, but while I would go lower than 100% duty cycle, unless the manufacturer suggested otherwise I would think 80% would be reasonable. If the data says I'm wrong though, then so be it :D
 
Do the failure rates show that? I think you could hardly be allowed to call your power supply a 600W PSU if it's not capable of supplying even 480w continuously. In-fact(though I'll have to check the box for my PSU, perhaps my brother's as well), don't the manufacturers specify the maximum duty cycle the PSU is capable of?


Edit: That's not to say running at the bleeding edge is what I suggest, but while I would go lower than 100% duty cycle, unless the manufacturer suggested otherwise I would think 80% would be reasonable. If the data says I'm wrong though, then so be it :D

If that's the fact then I think I should go home and get a new power supply for my computer...
 
Do the failure rates show that? I think you could hardly be allowed to call your power supply a 600W PSU if it's not capable of supplying even 480w continuously. In-fact(though I'll have to check the box for my PSU, perhaps my brother's as well), don't the manufacturers specify the maximum duty cycle the PSU is capable of?


Edit: That's not to say running at the bleeding edge is what I suggest, but while I would go lower than 100% duty cycle, unless the manufacturer suggested otherwise I would think 80% would be reasonable. If the data says I'm wrong though, then so be it :D

Try having a PSU run a month continuously at 80% or higher output. Most of them won't last long like that. They'll get too hot and overtime they will die. I've seen many machines with lower end power supplies burn them up in just over 30 days because the owners of the machines were too damned cheap to pony up the cash for something decent.
 
It's silly that people even bother to argue about that.
It's just like the onboard memory controller... People would argue that Athlon64 was much faster than Pentium because of the integrated controller.
Then Core2 comes along, and beats the Athlon64 in every way possible... But it's still on the exact same chipsets, motherboards and memory controllers as the Pentiums were.

Bottom line is: It's not how you design it, it's how well it performs.
All these design ideas are nice in theory, but if you cannot implement them in such a way that you actually get a faster processor, who cares?
Heck, if the fastest processor was powered by blue chipmunks with pink scarfs, I'd still buy it. See what I mean?

Ofcourse we all know that in theory an onboard controller or native quadcore could have some advantages, but as long as they aren't the faster processors, it means nothing. People who argue about that sort of stuff just don't get it.

Dang it! Now I can't shake the burning desire for a team of blue chipmunks with pink scarves inside my case. Wouldn't they look so cool with neon lighting, running on their little wheels to power my system?:)
 
So how many games do the Cards support anyway? How how big a difference do they make? I know with the 7 series cards from nVidia they coded the drivers to handle some of the physics processes.
 
It doesn't matter what Ageia has done for the industry or what they did not do. What counts is that at the end of the day, they do not have a product people want to buy. For all that their SDK may be capable of, there is nothing being put into games that makes a difference right now and there is absolutely ZERO reason to buy a PhysX card at this time.

If Ageia helps plant ANY notions about putting physics into ANY CPU/GPU/PPU, then they have made a significant contribution to my gaming atmosphere and yours.

So they're tangible products don't measure up or aren't feasible now. They've done a shitload more for gamers than we give them credit for.

It's like hating on ATI/AMD for their new cards/chips. They've given NVIDIA and Intel competition that only helps you out a consumer and I hope they get back on their horse and bring some serious game to next round.

I, for one, hope Ageia works their business plan out a bit and works with the GPU and CPU folks to get things rolling.
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"Most of it is not necessary. I recently read somewhere about a guy who actually metered out what his super-box actually uses and it's nowhere near what his 1kW can supply. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the 1kW hype is nothing more than epenis envy and the typical marketing hash (cue up fight club) about getting you to buy something you really don't need."

I meter out abuot 310w under Orthos with my rig, sans monitor or printer.
 
Wonder if runs fine on a dual core CPU. I would think that theoretically it should.

Video and sound are taken care of by their respective cards. One core can go to physics, and the other for whatever else the game needs to use. And considering games become GPU dependent at higer res, that core for "whatever else the game needs to use" probably is not much.
 
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"Most of it is not necessary. I recently read somewhere about a guy who actually metered out what his super-box actually uses and it's nowhere near what his 1kW can supply. I'm beginning to think that a lot of the 1kW hype is nothing more than epenis envy and the typical marketing hash (cue up fight club) about getting you to buy something you really don't need."

I meter out abuot 310w under Orthos with my rig, sans monitor or printer.

My system runs at 468watts idle (including monitor) and under load it draws around 580watts. (Also including the monitor.)
 
As for the lag... Lag is a result of the design of the chip. There's no guarantee that a single die has low latencies. Athlon64 is a good example of that. Its latencies are much closer to that of the Pentium D than to the Core2 Duo. That's because the Athlon still uses an external bus to synchronize both caches, much like the FSB system on the Pentium D, while the Core2 Duo is designed with only one L2-cache, shared by both cores. Athlon's dualcore design (and performance) is nearly identical to two single-core CPUs on a 2-socket motherboard with HT-links.
The same still goes for Barcelona... It still has separate L2-caches, it only has a (very small) shared L3-cache, so it will still have higher latencies than Core2, at least for the pairs of cores that share their L2-cache.
So it's not exactly a great 'native' design. They could have gotten much more of an advantage out of the single-die design if they had shared L2-caches, and larger caches at that (drop the L3 altogether, just make the L2 larger).

The benchmarks speak volumes... All this talk about their super-fast native quadcore was just a load of crap, we don't see anything of that in the actual performance of the chip.

well yeah, Your showcasing the flaws of K8 without bringing up its saving grace: the on board north bridge.

When your dealing with highly cached small amounts of data, theres no doubt that intels huge unified L2 will take the lead, but the extra clocks needed to acess information on system ram on an intel system compared to an AMD system make AMD's memory sub-system still quite compeditive.

We dont see the performance of the barcelona (period). seems to me AMD is still in the alpha stages with barcelona. They're releasing a new processor on a new socket with a new memory design and and new PCI-e design, and your complaining that the benchmarks don't look so hot yet?

I'm not sure where you are going with this, but the fact is that it seems a bit odd to spend $179.99 for a card that only enhances one game. It doesn't do alot in other games. Basically the GRAW games get a small improvement and that's all.

You're not a hard core CS player. I'd gladly pay $200 if it meant that I would no longer suffer from basement FPS when in the middle of a couple of smokes (even on my 8800).

When I was in the middle of a skrmish game in CS on DE_dust2 and there was five or six smokes at double doors (the middle of the map where the two teams often meet) I was only player --on either team-- that hadthe harware to plow through that kind of area and maintain playable settings. When I last did this, there were four smokes total at double doors and I was getting about 20fps. I ran through it and found myself instantly face to face with a guy from the other team. I could clearly see he had hardware problems (or possibly really really bad aim) as he shot the wall for a few seconds before sending his bullets anywhere near me. Needless to say I got the sweet one deag (1 shot from a huge pistol to the head doing a little over 100 dmg, enough for a 1 hit KO). A friend of mine whos on a 3 year old crap-box has to look away when he sees a (one) smoke or he can barely manage 4 or 5 fps. When someone throws a smoke, he has to go the long way around O.O
 
You're not a hard core CS player. I'd gladly pay $200 if it meant that I would no longer suffer from basement FPS when in the middle of a couple of smokes (even on my 8800).

No I am not but I can understand your reasoning.
 
?? What resolution are you playing at?

I'm pretty zealous with regards to CS:S, and with my 8800GTS at 1290x960, with everything maxed, I have no issues to the extent that you are saying.

Stupid question, but in your Steam menu, have you made sure that your connection is at 10mbps vs. 56K?
 
My system runs at 468watts idle (including monitor) and under load it draws around 580watts. (Also including the monitor.)

Right, but your box is overloaded with SLI this and watercooling that. 1k PSU's are being advised for single GTX boxes on air.

Besides, you run 580 max. Peaking at what? Anywhere near 1k?

Edit: Don't mean to argue, but I'm now understanding the need for 1k, and your response didn't straighten anything out. Just the opposite infact. Unless wattage usage in our PC's are akin to AVR's and speaker loads?
 
The biggest shot against the PPU is that the game engines are starting to put true hybrid threaded multi core support, where the game decides what to do with the cores. One can be AI, one can be physics, another can do sound. Valve has already shown benchmarks of truly doubling the performance when moving from dual core to quad core using proper multi core support. Giving the developers the tools to do this right in the engine makes the job a lot easier, rather than playing with some hardware specific SDK.

The GPU presents another hit against the PPU with the new process offloading technology. The latest line of ATI cards can perform at half a teraflop, which is an incredible amount of processing power when used properly. The Havok physics engine, probably the most popular of them all, has already announced multi threaded GPU support in the near future for offloading, and others will be doing they same if the haven't already.

In my opinion the PPU was a short lived experiment that pushed the industry in the right direction, but is ultimately doomed to fail because of specialized SDKs and subsequently limited support.
 
I thought the second GPU-looking thing (w/e it's called) on the 8800 GTX was designed for physics processing?
 
I really wish people would actually look at on GPU physics, finding out the pros and cons for themselves, than just think “Hey, physics on the GPU, why bother with the CPU/PPU then?”.
 
So, in the future, like, we won't even need CPU's to game, right, because the GPU will have like everything we need, right? It has physics, teraflops, other cool stuff I've never heard of. Why do we need physics cards and like, quad cores? All we need is an 8800GTX, and if there's no CPU then it'll work with my Apevia 500W power supply! Joy!
 
So, in the future, like, we won't even need CPU's to game, right, because the GPU will have like everything we need, right? It has physics, teraflops, other cool stuff I've never heard of. Why do we need physics cards and like, quad cores? All we need is an 8800GTX, and if there's no CPU then it'll work with my Apevia 500W power supply! Joy!

No.
 
Right, but your box is overloaded with SLI this and watercooling that. 1k PSU's are being advised for single GTX boxes on air.

Besides, you run 580 max. Peaking at what? Anywhere near 1k?

Edit: Don't mean to argue, but I'm now understanding the need for 1k, and your response didn't straighten anything out. Just the opposite infact. Unless wattage usage in our PC's are akin to AVR's and speaker loads?

I can't speak for him but I doubt it's anywhere near 1k. My system runs 8800 (gts though) SLI, oc'd core2, 6 sata drives, 4gb of ram off a 750 PSU.

Now granted, obviously everything isn't pushing redline constantly, but still a lot of the larger PSU's are just overkill.
 
I can't speak for him but I doubt it's anywhere near 1k. My system runs 8800 (gts though) SLI, oc'd core2, 6 sata drives, 4gb of ram off a 750 PSU.

Now granted, obviously everything isn't pushing redline constantly, but still a lot of the larger PSU's are just overkill.

I enjoy running my system (see sig) with a CM 850W because it does so with consummate ease. Could I have gotten away with a lesser PSU? Sure, but I like the headroom. Cooler, quieter, more safe. I guess the same could be said for cars & engine RPM at given speeds.

It helps that I work for an OEM and got a good deal, too :D
 
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