AGEIA's PPU - Beyond physics

[Frank]

I call Bullshit. Remaining tight-lipped for well over a year about a product you've been trying to sell does nothing positive for your revenue.

Definitely.

If they had something like that, they would have gone all-out. ANd computer architecture is quite well known, so such "breakthroughs" should be regarded with a very big pinch of salt.

If you buy into their hype, you should buy a Cell instead. It's at least twice as good at it.

 

[Ateo]

Definitely.

If they had something like that, they would have gone all-out. ANd computer architecture is quite well known, so such "breakthroughs" should be regarded with a very big pinch of salt.

If you buy into their hype, you should buy a Cell instead. It's at least twice as good at it.

Oh really?
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=932174&postcount=14

Ateo - @ new job, so I won't be much on for the next time being...

 

[Mat3]

I'm pretty skeptical about the physx processor just doing physics. Here's a two year old article of them showcasing a demo of 4,200 boulders.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1817922,00.asp

They claimed that the driver was holding the hardware back and it was actually capable of 32,000 boulders. A while ago ATI showed a demo with 20,000 boulders. I'm wondering where was Ageia to counter with a new and improved driver to showcase 30,000+ boulders? And they also could have talked up the great design of the PPU by saying it, at 130 nm, can do more than an X1900XTX at 90 nm. Put the PPU at 90 nm and they'd get a free speed increase and maybe more processing elements. (One thing I'm not sure about the physx demo is whether updated boulder positions were actually being saved or if it was all just effects physics, or whether or not that would impact performance. For the Ati demo, I'm sure it was all just effects.)

This is just one example, but I haven't really seen anything to showcase the 32,000 rigid bodies they claim to be capable of. Mostly it seems there's just a few hundred objects flying around in any given video that I've seen. Aside from Cell Factor's cloth and fluids (which is not a big deal as far as gameplay goes), we've yet to see any proof of Ageia's claims of 32,000 rigid bodies and 40,000+ particles.