What you REALLY think of AGEIA....

[Vertigo1]

http://www.overclockers.com/tips00967/

Funny shit man.

[Spyder]

Seperate physics cards are among the cooler of industries dumb ideas.

[InnocentBystander]

It's a cool idea, but without support I can't see it going anywhere. And I gota say, they really should have made it for the PCI-E 1 slot; there is so little hardware to put in those suckers, I'm sure some people who buy those crazy things just to have something in the x1 slot (or have more devices for the PCI-E x1 slot come out recently?).

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

The PhysX was just a bad idea from the start, and I thought so on the day it was announced. Without a killer app that can't be played without the PhysX, nobody's going to plunk down the money. Without a large install base, nobody's going to make a game that requires a PhysX. Chicken and egg. Therefore, it's impossible for it to succeed.

The only way they could have been successful is by putting it in a console or making the killer app themselves. The first one isn't feasible because a physics card isn't right for any of the three consoles: The 360 and PS3 don't need it because the of the CPU designs, and Nintendo wouldn't want to add to their console's price. The second one doesn't work because they're not game developers.

The only thing I don't understand is why the people who financed them didn't see that. More money than sense, I suppose.

[Pu-239]

Then again, the same chicken and egg problem could be said for DVDs when they came out... so it's not impossible, just hard. And the next UT engine is supposed to support it.

That said, it's something better integrated into a graphics card.

Also,
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/disp ... 02331.html

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Then again, the same chicken and egg problem could be said for DVDs when they came out...

What do you mean?

[Ace Pace]

The PhysX will only pick up with Unreal Tournament 2007 and the other UE3 engine games, which acording to Sweeny have good support for the PhysX that(paraphasing his words) 'dosn't lower preformance, as you expect an accelerator to improve preformance'.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Then again, the same chicken and egg problem could be said for DVDs when they came out... so it's not impossible, just hard.

I wouldn't say that. DVD's offered chapter selection, improved video and sound quality, no tape hiss, were more compact, and commentary and special features. Because this was recognized, content providers were willing to take the plunge and release movies on DVD.

Without a killer app whose gameplay is built around the card's physics capabilities and which will not run without one, the PhysX offers practically nothing. In addition to the need for a killer app that DVD did not have, the situations are also dissimilar in that a movie did not have to be shot specially for the DVD format, whereas to really take advantage of the PhysX, a game has to be made especially for it.

And the next UT engine is supposed to support it.

Support means nothing if it's just a bit more flying debris or slightly prettier water and hair. They need a killer app or very few people will buy the card. But until a lot of people buy the card, no one is going to make a killer app. This is not a solvable problem.

[Uraniun235]

I think dual-core (and eventually, quad-core) CPUs are going to keep this thing in a little niche pocket, if not squeeze it out within a few years.

[weemadando]

The biggest problem is that the AGEIA in GRAW merely adds MORE crap to be processed, leading to a slowing down of the game overall, rather than just decreasing the physics load on the CPU for an overall performance increase.

[Ace Pace]

The biggest problem is that the AGEIA in GRAW merely adds MORE crap to be processed, leading to a slowing down of the game overall, rather than just decreasing the physics load on the CPU for an overall performance increase.

Theres also some talk that it was due to drivers(AGEIA released new drivers that seem to help alot) or due to bad implementation.

[weemadando]

There's a great demonstration of it at one of the Ghost Recon sites, the AGEIA just tells the game to generate more debris, smoke etc etc etc for it to process, leading to an enhanced load on the system, rather than just making the existing physics effects work better.

[Ace Pace]

There's a great demonstration of it at one of the Ghost Recon sites, the AGEIA just tells the game to generate more debris, smoke etc etc etc for it to process, leading to an enhanced load on the system, rather than just making the existing physics effects work better.

Yes, I know the status of GRAW. I'm just saying that it's possibly either due to idiotic implementation or bad drivers. Infact, those who tested with newer drivers say theres not much of a preformance difference, I'll try to find out reviews.

Tim Sweeny(Epic coder) has abit more to say on how they're using the AEGIA, which sounds interesting.

Whoever mentioned HavokFX, read.

Jacob- There was a lot of controversy with the recently released Ghost Recon, where some players got lower performance when enabling Ageia effects because the video card has to render more objects. Is that something that should be expected or should frame rate be the same?

Sweeney- For the record, acceleration hardware is supposed to accelerate your frame rate, not decrease it! [laughs] That seems like it’s just a messy tradeoff that they made there. You certainly want your physics hardware to improve your frame rate. That means that the physics hardware might in some cases be able to update more objects so you can actually render another frame, so you need to have some sort of rendering LOD scheme for that to manage the object counts, and obviously you don't want to take this ultra fast physics card and plug it into a machine with a crummy video card. You really want to have a great video card to match up with your physics hardware and also a decent CPU to have your system in balance to really be able to take advantage of the full thing.

Jacob- How about Ageia effects over a network? Is that supported or is it Client side? I imagine trying to push that amount of physics data through the network, there might be a bottleneck.

Sweeney- There are a number of networking solutions for physics, what we are doing in UT2007 is using the physics hardware only for accelerating special effects objects, things where the server tells the client, Spawn this special effect here! The client responds with an explosion with thousands of particles, and each of those operates as a separate physics object but it doesn't effect the game play... it’s just purely a visual effect there. That’s the easiest and most common solution.

Some of the other solutions it looks like other teams are using are only enabling the physics hardware's networking on a LAN environment, where the entire physics state of the world is being replicated to all the clients, that requires a vast amount of bandwidth, more than even a broadband connection has there, so that’s not very practical.

The other approach is to run a peer to peer lockstep game, which would be ideal for like a fighting game or some other game with 2 players or 4 players playing against each other where the entire game runs in lockstep, everybody has hardware and the entire game state evolves deterministically on all of the machines.

Jacob- Havok recently announced the ability to accelerate physics on the GPU. Is that necessarily a bad idea?

Sweeney- That’s a good approach, they have some good technology there. Havok has a physics system that runs largely on the GPU to accelerate the computations there. It seems to be a lower precision physics than you have for the rest of the game which is problematic. You really want all the physics in the world to be drawing with a constant level of precision, so you don't have to make weird trade-offs there. I guess there is also the trade-off with that, if your GPU is doing both physics and graphics, then you are not getting the full utilization out of the system.