Physics Processor - AGEIA (Cool Demo)

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Did anyone try creating walls multiple times in a row? It kills performance. When you do it, you'll see why.

 

Nonsense. When Voodoo1 appeared, ATI was making crappy 2D cards and nVidia wasn't even there yet or just started developing nV1 (which sucked a**). Carmack coded GLQuake on 3Dfx because it was the only "real" 3D card back then. Yes, there was Rendition etc. but they were all not even half as fast or feature rich.

Back then, there was no real 3D API available for gaming. That's why glide was so successfull - it was easy to code for and there was a HW which could do a bunch of neat things noone else could.

Now talking about Diablo2 or Unreal, that was all a couple of years later. DirectX was still crap, OGL was only used by id so far and you had a bunch of developers who programmed glide last couple of years. They had the choice to program for glide or to try getting these things work with Directx6 and nVidia Riva128 and ATI's still 2 1/2D RageBlahXXX crap. So logically, they invested their time in coding for the proven, widespread platform which was Glide and haven't wasted their time with programming for those three geeks who whined over not being able to play Unreal on their ATI RageProSuperUltraMaXX0r with 2MB RAM...

 

You continue to think, despite my admonition, that that's the dichotomy I seek.

8)

So that's why I sold one of my VooDoo 2s and got a TNT2? It wasn't perhaps because it had 32-bit colour, OpenGL ICD and DirectX support out of the box right? And if what you say is true then why did 3Dfx go under? Wait, you say below "they didn't have the hardware", that's right. What I said.

1) You get a lot of like-minded people together and mass mail Aegis with your "manifesto". Hello lobby pressure.
2) In mboards, such as this, instead of praising whatever new comes regardless of consequences, and instead of resignation of what's to come, put your concerns forward now.
3) If all else fails, don't buy something that will ultimately be a bad thing.

But I guess Digi's post exemplifies most people today: hey, that looks cool, I want it, I want it now, me, me, me, now, now, now, what do I care that 5 years down the road I'll be paying $500+ for each part and get shitty availability?

Here's another example: even though I'm very happy with my R9800 Pro a while ago I posted that Valve was doing the wrong thing and setting a bad precedent for not allowing GFFXs to use mixed precision and dropping them to Dx8. "Oh screw GFFX owners, they should have known better", "Valve probably saw their GFFX market share and decided not to bother", "it's their game, they decide". What do we see now? We see games (like Chaos Theory and STALKER) that could run perfectly alright in Dx9 mode in R3xx/R4xx cards but that will have to run in Dx8 mode. I hate to say "I told you so" as I didn't even expect the comeback to arrive so soon. I guess "R4xx buyers should have known better" and "it's their game, they decide".

How does liking to play older games comes in contradiction to liking to play newer games?

But it is up to Ageia to move quickly in an open direction instead of like 3Dfx which did their best to delay that. Here's a little quote from Carmack July 3 1997:

Wasn't that the truth?

If they don't, then like _xxx_ said the "logical" (yeah, right) step is to continue to support the available proprietary API.

It did, and then it was having problems getting through to consumers because even in 2000 there were games (like Diablo 2) with GLide mode that performed better, at lower quality settings than <insert competitor here> that had to run in OGL/DX.

 

Can people return to the actual topic of this thread and not recovering age-old arguments, please? Otherwise, the thread will just get some serious pruning.

 

Whoa! A Cell APU for the PCI Express

An interesting idea, but will probably hit the wall as soon as Intel and AMD decide to do some research in this area

 

Good thing it isn't a cell apu

 

Mine ("Bubbles: Athlon XP-M 2400+ (12x200), NF7-s rev 2, 1Gb PC3200, OEM Sapphire ATi Radeon 256MB X800 pro VIVO (flashed 16 pipes 500/540), Audigy2, Altec-Lansing ADA885, ATi TV-wonder VE, DVDR, 2x10/100NIC, 80GB, 200GB sATA") ran it like butter, the only one that really slowed mine down was the exploding builiding one so far.

My daughter loved whipping the ragdolls around and smashing the block towers to pieces and such.

 

Ok, OnT, I'm surprised by the amount of local memory these parts are supposed to have, isn't 128mb (GDR3 at that) a little too excessive? Anyone with hands-on knowledge of physics implementations wants to chime in?

I can understand the concept of caching especially on PCI parts but when I read that interview with more info (I missed the first page) I expected a smaller and faster cache particularly due to PCI-e's full duplex capability.

There's also some who believe a PPU would be of better use combined with video cards. I can certainly see that line of reasoning considering that a PPU is only going to be used for games (at least initially) and that if you're looking to offload some work from the CPU then that probably means you have a capable 3D card that's waiting for the CPU to begin with.

If this is done, is there a potential problem of saturating the PCI-e bus? Not speed wise, but where latency is concerned?

 

Cool news,

http://www.tomshardware.com/hardnews/20050308_214530.html

 

A dedicated physics coprocessor makes no sense at all for the PC market. If it has a use anywhere, it would be in the professional simulations market.

That is to say, there's just no way to smoothly make the transition from software physics to hardware-acclerated physics on the PC, not like there was with 3D graphics.

 

You worry a bit too much, 5 years is a long time and the Digi ain't no fool.

 

Why not? We've had the option to run graphics in hardware or software mode for a while, why not the same with physics?

 

Cool news indeed, that $400 figure just chilled me to the bone.

 

Try the Building Explode or Big Bang demo and you'll see why you need dedicated chip for physics.
As side note: Big Bang demo totally killed my AthlonXP 3400+ (Tbred)
Building Explode ran smooth for like 5 seconds when there is not much physics used. After that it just goes down.

 

Not everyone will buy the $400 dollar card. I'd settle for the $100-$200 level card. The same works with graphics cards. A X850 XT PE is over priced, but people purchase it. Same goes for the 6800 Ultra or two 6800 Utras in SLI for $1000! It depends on the person. If you look for reasons to not want it you will find them, and that can be said for ANY PRODUCT!