RIGHT THEN
First order of business, a little background info. Quoted from:
SWEET HUH
Even cooler, they've got working demos as of now. Can you imagine? Up to 50,000 rigid bones at once. That's fucking insane. Here are some screenshots I took:
It's a lot of fun to play around with, and there are dozens of demos, some of which will absolutely shock you. Download it here:
First order of business, a little background info. Quoted from:
After decades of listening about Central Processing Units, years of listening about Graphic Processing Units and millimoments of listening about audio processing units, it is time to learn the new term. It's time to start talking about physics processing units (PPUs).
I have a feeling that we will be talking much more about such PPUs in the near future as these are going to change the way computer games look like. The company behind this marchitecture is called AGEIA and is a "Fabless Company" with lots of investors around, including mighty Taiwanese giant TSMC and the almost almighty Bank'o'America. Here in San Francisco's Games Developer Conference the firm revealed its chip called symbolically PhysX. It’s the world first Physics Processing Unit (PPU), they reckon. These guys have taped out the chip and made a final product and reference card design ready as we write.
The answer is actually an add in card with either PCI Express or a PCI interface with up to 128MB of dedicated GDDR 3 memory that will take over all physics in the games. We saw some cool demos done in software on a laptop of what this card can do. It can operate with 32000 particles/rigid bodies or should I say bones? [You should, Fudo, you should. Ed.] When we talk about fluids, such cards can handle up to 50000 rigid bones. A CPU can do a couple hundred at the most.
The card operates under 25W (Watts) so the company is still not sure whether it needs an external power connector or not. The chip itself has 125 million transistors and it's quite a large piece of silicon but that's no probbo for TSMC. The chip and card designs are ready, so the company only needs retailers, OEMs and notebook manufacturers to embrace the marchitecture and start releasing designs. There will be cards for notebooks to boost gaming physics on notebooks as well.
I have a feeling that we will be talking much more about such PPUs in the near future as these are going to change the way computer games look like. The company behind this marchitecture is called AGEIA and is a "Fabless Company" with lots of investors around, including mighty Taiwanese giant TSMC and the almost almighty Bank'o'America. Here in San Francisco's Games Developer Conference the firm revealed its chip called symbolically PhysX. It’s the world first Physics Processing Unit (PPU), they reckon. These guys have taped out the chip and made a final product and reference card design ready as we write.
The answer is actually an add in card with either PCI Express or a PCI interface with up to 128MB of dedicated GDDR 3 memory that will take over all physics in the games. We saw some cool demos done in software on a laptop of what this card can do. It can operate with 32000 particles/rigid bodies or should I say bones? [You should, Fudo, you should. Ed.] When we talk about fluids, such cards can handle up to 50000 rigid bones. A CPU can do a couple hundred at the most.
The card operates under 25W (Watts) so the company is still not sure whether it needs an external power connector or not. The chip itself has 125 million transistors and it's quite a large piece of silicon but that's no probbo for TSMC. The chip and card designs are ready, so the company only needs retailers, OEMs and notebook manufacturers to embrace the marchitecture and start releasing designs. There will be cards for notebooks to boost gaming physics on notebooks as well.
Even cooler, they've got working demos as of now. Can you imagine? Up to 50,000 rigid bones at once. That's fucking insane. Here are some screenshots I took:
It's a lot of fun to play around with, and there are dozens of demos, some of which will absolutely shock you. Download it here:
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