PPU-Physics Processing Unit
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White Haven
- Sith Acolyte
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Main advantage is to get wider distribution faster. If people can't NOT get PPUs on new systems or video card upgrades, you get more systems out there with them faster, and hence more incentive for developers to take advantage of them sooner. Now the ideal would be to do both, so that people can CHOOSE to add one, or can add one when they upgrade video. Otherwise it'll take an indecently long time for this to achieve market penetration.
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Bandwidth, for one. Unlike GPUs which more or less can have data sent just to it PPUs would have to constantly be talking to the CPU and that might well take up enormous amounts of bandwidth -- and the high-speed PCIe slots are currently reserved for GPU usage.SPOOFE wrote:You're right, those are indeed physically possible. But why not just put it on a separate PCI card instead avoid all that ridiculous stuff?
Some sort of standardized API like "Direct Physics" might also be useful.White Haven wrote:Main advantage is to get wider distribution faster. If people can't NOT get PPUs on new systems or video card upgrades, you get more systems out there with them faster, and hence more incentive for developers to take advantage of them sooner. Now the ideal would be to do both, so that people can CHOOSE to add one, or can add one when they upgrade video. Otherwise it'll take an indecently long time for this to achieve market penetration.
Most PCIe slots on motherboards, besides the x16 one used for video cards, are x1 slots, which have a relatively pitiful amount of bandwith, and a PPU would require a fairly high bandwith connection, because the objects being modelled would be changing almost constantly. The reason for this is because most motherboards only have 20 or so PCIe lanes available.
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PCIe 1x slots are 2.5gbps fully duplex, thats not bad considering PCI 1.0 is just over ~1gbps non-duplex and the bandwidth for PCI 1.0 starts dropping due to overheads once it starts switching betweening sending and recieving.Beowulf wrote:Most PCIe slots on motherboards, besides the x16 one used for video cards, are x1 slots, which have a relatively pitiful amount of bandwith,
Without more details with how the PPU interacts with the host-side drivers this is probalby going to be hard to call.and a PPU would require a fairly high bandwith connection, because the objects being modelled would be changing almost constantly. The reason for this is because most motherboards only have 20 or so PCIe lanes available.
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