Asus makes PhysX boards

I'd guess that separating out physics calculations onto a separate AIB would take atleast a couple of killer-apps anyway..? People seem to be good at creating markets these days, so if they have the funds and energy to involve/inspire the right developers, they might get this snowball running...

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K

 

Meh, I would rather see some good innovations for the CPU rather then having to buy yet another board.

 

I don't know, haven't been keeping up with the scene last few months. Can you give some examples?

 

Nobody is going to write a fabulous physics engine if you know you're going to make the CPU crawl and leave your game unplayable.

 

I know that Counter-Strike:Source is very CPU limited. I have a 6800 Ultra, and was unable to get much of any FPS change even by lowering resolutions, so I just left the resolution at 1600x1200 (No AA or AF). When I upgraded my CPU from a p4 3.0ghz machine to an Athlon 3600+ though, I got a huge increase in performance (20fps+ ).

 

I have some doubts about that new add-in board. When i ask around me, less and less people bother to buy an add-in sound card already, i really doubt theses guys will buy that ppu card. Of course if it is proven to be a must have things may change.

 

That's because there are integrated sound cards available. Even an integrated PPU should still be much better than just a processor.

 

I agree but i did not see yet any MB maker put one on their product.

 

It depends what you want to do. There is a large amount of all kinds of FP caclculations (vector, mostly) that the CPU has to run as long as you have no other unit that can do them. The GPU is not flexible enough. If you add a high-speed math (vector) unit, like CELL or a PPU, you can use that to off-load most of it, leaving the CPU for the managing and things like AI. There is much more batched brute force FP calculations to 3D games on the CPU than anything else.

You only have to watch out for copying data too much to and from, as that is a relatively slow thing and would leave the CPU with nothing else to do in the mean time. Blocks of code that fit into the cache are good and fast, handling large amounts of data that don't fit starves the bandwidth pretty fast.

 

Which is exactly why an add-in PPU would be more attractive that an add-in sound card. Also, it's probably much easier to evaluate the impact of the PPU than the sound card especially since integrated solutions are of sufficiently high quality already.

 

I'm thinking more and more this type of unit will replace the DSP in the south bridge of nforce products as an example. Perfect candidate.
I don't think the sound card market is a good analogy cause it seems to be different to other sectors of the pc industry. Stunted and deformed.

 

If this thing is a success, one of the big boys will buy it up and integrate it.

 

Creative will buy it up and then we will soon be saying...

...just like sound cards

 

Great, yet another noisy fan to try to eliminate from my case!

 

What's with the connectors on both edges? PCI and PCIe 1x?

 

Nope, CI was right, one is PCI (keyed for both 5v and 3.3v), the other PCIe (and AFAIK it could be 2x or 4x too). Search for some pictures of pci and agp if you don't believe me

 

Interesting if that's the reference design. I was wondering how much bandwidth is needed for the kind of processing needed. Wouldn't there be any inefficiencies by having the NB, SB chips and respective buses in between the CPU/RAM and the PPU card on PCI(e)?