Last Month the Japanese try to retrive this mod a little bit more. They played in the at 2pm CET. At the moment the gametracker,com Server Monitorring is off. Hope soon they turn it on. The ranking seems to work.
Registered Member #414 Joined: [ 12:47 ] [ 23 Jun 2004 ]
well it doesn't necessarily have to be compatible with a video card because its the first ever physics processor. read about it here http://www.ageia.com/products/physx.html
Registered Member #397 Joined: [ 23:55 ] [ 16 Jun 2004 ]
where you gonna buy it, i didnt see anything on that site about it being out soon. but i think physics processors are going to be the the next biggest things to help make games better since the graphics processor. WOOT!!!
Registered Member #727 Joined: [ 10:25 ] [ 12 Nov 2004 ]
Actually, I have a lot of doubt about these physics processors. There are certain problems with this approach. First of all, in most physics engines today, you have to specify behaviour for everything in detail. To get all the required values (e.g. speed), you will always need a lot of informaton directly from the processor, so this will use a lot more bandwith than a normal GPU. It will use even more because the data has to get transferred to the GPU at some point, and for this, it will have to go through the CPU again so that a programmer can do stuff he likes with the results (for example, adjust the positions of smoke emitters or something like that).
I've also read in various places that this particular company does not do highly realistic physics, but only cares about large amounts of boxes you can throw around. While this might be sufficient for most games, there are always applications where precision is absolutely necessary.
Finally, there's the question what features this processor has. Does it have ray-cast cars (standard today for cars with realistic behaviour)? Has it something like fluid dynamics, or at least something that does something similar (required for highly realistic flight simulators, but useful for quite a lot of stuff)? I don't know, but even if it has, there will always be new developments that this PPU cannot be used for.
My final opinion: A processor that has the same kind of horsepower as a GPU (especially massively parallel processing) but is still freely configurable, like the CELL (which has, however, other problems that prevent it from being king) seems to be more like the right direction for me.
Registered Member #423 Joined: [ 05:49 ] [ 25 Jun 2004 ]
i say its better then nothin...
and problems? try running bf2 at max settings with a 128MB card and see what happens..
everything has its "problems" if you remember the first video cards there was voodoo stuff and directX.. while voodoo was propiraty and directX was more open both had issues. give it a gen or two and see what they come up with.
Registered Member #334 Joined: [ 20:26 ] [ 27 May 2004 ]
coch, the physicsprocessor is built in a way you have no idea of, you can just speculate of how it will work so far, but eventualy it will work, its not only that company who works on it. and dude, it will send separate signals just like splitting the work leaving the physics for the physics processor.
Registered Member #727 Joined: [ 10:25 ] [ 12 Nov 2004 ]
Teabag, you're right, I have no idea how this thing works, but neither do you. Some of the issues I wrote about earlier are rubbish, I admit, because I now could actually read the description page (site was down this morning) and it answered a lot of my questions.
However, there are still some points where I have no idea how they solved the inherent problems, and this makes it impossible to say whether the first generation of these things will have the same flexibility as current physics engines do. Of course, I've only worked with one of them (Newton) so far, so I am not an expert, but there are certain problems with the whole concept that will be hard to overcome. Integrating this into games will be a very difficult task for all companies out there today.
Edit: Bah, I just realised that I wrote a lot of rubbish without content here. Okay, so here are the issues I'm talking about: - A physics engine always needs input from the CPU to be any useful, and it needs a lot more customisable power than a GPU does. For example, what forces should be applied to what body - this cannot be load once and then forgotten about, this changes every frame. The code my game needs to update the physics engine every frame is already about 200 lines, and I've got only one moving object in there. - Synchronization. There needs to be a mechanism to ensure that the data the CPU has, the data the GPU has and the data the PPU has are always in sync, so that the GPU draws all objects at the right locations and the CPU can do all the other effects correctly. This problem is also very important when optimizing games to take advantage of multiple CPUs and can come close to a rewrite of major parts of the engine.
I am certain that they have solutions for this, because otherwise no major game studio would even consider supporting this, but how good they actually work remains to be seen.
<span class='smallblacktext'>[ Edited 21 Nov : 21:38 ]</span>