Anyone smell DirectX 11? Built-in physics card in the gpu. Thats what microsoft needs to make up for Vista.

gamecrazychris

@WolvenOne:

"Nvidia and AMD are not likely to go anywhere. However, the entire business of selling five hundred dollar GPU's eventually will"

Not trying to pick on you, but Jesus Christ. Each company has to make the fastest card they can as a flagship of sorts. That will always be the case. Always.

homernoy

@V1L3: I wouldn't put it past nvidia to buy out a company just to shut them down. That's essentially what they did to 3Dfx.

By the way, I kind of feel like physics cards have been facing an uphill battle ever since their inception. Back when 3D accelerator cards where first made there where real tangible benefits to having a 3D accelerator card especially with those cards that actually started benefitting performance. It doesn't seem so with physics cards. Adding one doesn't give tangible benefits in most games and can even hurt performance because your video card can't keep up with the increase of objects in the games that do take advantage.

It seems like physics with multiple CPUs is the main way to go nowadays despite them saying that something like this could offer performance benefits. Perhaps Physics on the GPU may be good but no one has seemed to have done it yet?

smoke_tetsu

I hope they can integrate the PhysX tech onto a future Nvidia card!

topaz420

@WolvenOne: "I mean, what use are 50000 Teraflops of processing power if developers are only using 300 of them?"

Multitasking perhaps? Running all your middleware, matchmaking software, voice chat, other applications, utlities, etc (especially on the PC)... having cycles to spare is always good. It's possible to also put GPUs to more work than just processing graphics and on the PC you can do stereovision which requires that the GPU be able to proces the same scene more than once. So having headroom to be able to do extra things is a good thing.

smoke_tetsu

@WolvenOne:

"Okay, look, currently, when GPU's start going sluggish, it's, "not," because they're being maxed out, it's because of shoddy programing. Vista alone has been show to severely damage performance in PC titles, so you can only imagine what other hits hardware might take when it runs sloppily programed unoptimized software"

That is completely false. I run Vista Ultimate x64 and the performance hit is negligible with the proper specs.

"PC game developers themselves have said they're going to, "slow down," visual enhancements, to make certain their games can be ported to consoles"

I am not saying your making this up, but I have never heard anything close to this claim. Do you have a source?

Just to clarify things, if devs had unlimited options due to hardware that was impossible to tax, you would be seeing things as nice looking or nicer looking that Shrek or any other CG movie out there in realtime.

I can't really believe you think the hardware is being stiffled by the software as far as the hardware could do so much more if someone tried harder.

homernoy

I should also note. Nvidia and AMD are not likely to go anywhere. However, the entire business of selling five hundred dollar GPU's eventually will. These companies will still have a life selling smaller, quieter chips once they max out practical performance. After that, they'll still make money selling GPU's that are embedded into mothers and products such as the Playstation 4.

and for the record. I own both a X-box 360, Playstation 3, and a Wii. Not to mention an SNES, Saturn, N64, and so on and so forth.

WolvenOne

Okay, look, currently, when GPU's start going sluggish, it's, "not," because they're being maxed out, it's because of shoddy programing. Vista alone has been show to severely damage performance in PC titles, so you can only imagine what other hits hardware might take when it runs sloppily programed unoptimized software.

The problem with that, is you cannot rely on it to keep the GPU market going. Do you really think that Microsoft is going to put out newer, increasingly buggy operating systems every couple years to handicap GPU's and keep the cycle going? If so, do you really think the market is going to put up with it? The consumer can only take so much abuse, especially when it's abuse in the wallet, and the fact that PC game sales seem to be declining somewhat, suggests that some PC gamers may have already had enough.

Besides, lets look at this mathmaticly.

PC game developers themselves have said they're going to, "slow down," visual enhancements, to make certain their games can be ported to consoles like the X-box and Playstation 3. GPU's on the other hand, become roughly twice as powerful every year. If PC games are not going to ramp up visuals as rapidly, than than growth in performance is not going to be as heavily utilized as in the past.

Another problem is both cost and time. The more visually stunning a game is, the longer it takes to develop, which means developers would need to spend more money on fewer games, and if there are fewer games, than PC's become increasingly poor values for gamers.

Could companies keep pushing things to the limit for awhile. Yes, for at least five years. However, that business model isn't viable, and will eventually lead to a dead end.

However, by integrating things such as sound and physics into a GPU, you increase the versatility of the device, and make it easier to develop titles at the same time. This results in lower development costs, and allows the cycle to continue on for awhile longer.

Now, adding things like support to procedural generation, and AI chips to video cards, would also increase the lifespan of the buisness model. However, ultimatly it's all going to end up in the same place.

Short of having another revolution, such as the jump between 2D sprites and 3D polygons, you simply cannot push the buisness model beyond a certain point. As I said, the eye can only render so much detail, and companies can only spend so many years developing a game.

I mean, what use are 50000 Teraflops of processing power if developers are only using 300 of them?

WolvenOne

@WolvenOne: Check the quarterly earnings before you make false statements about the PC graphics market.

What console do you own? It doesn't matter, because it is one of the two companies (for the most part) that are the discrete solutions in the majority of all PC's.

So, I guess these two companies are giving those GPU's away to Sony and Microsoft huh? Dying indeed.

homernoy

this is good news indeed. it means by the time i would what to buy a physics card, i won't have too. [:

jerrt

You know, what I really care about is this hardware gets more support from devs. I would buy the stand alone card in a seconed if around 50% of PC games took advantage of the PhysX card.

UT3 does, as well as a few others but that is about it. I mean this is first gen (for the most part) hardware from Ageia and you can just imagine what would happen if there was a little more capital behind this company.

Crysis barrel and box demos in real time coming soon to a PC near you!! If this does happen, it will be good for everyone ( that happen to be PC gamers ). I can't wait.

homernoy

@Witzbold: LOL.. they did that and called it the GeForce 9800. I'm almost afraid to see what will happen with the physX card. It'll probably be a branded API into the shader array they already have. I doubt the will put extra specialized hardware into the system when they are pushing parallelization so hard.

okenny :)

@WolvenOne: Haha...I see where you're coming from and agree that NVIDIA/ATI have to expand further than just graphics, but you wouldn't believe how you can force the most expensive GPU in the world into submission - even three of them in SLI. No, not just with Crysis.

How about tweaking an already demanding Gothic 3 by removing the blur from the LOD, and increasing the viewing distance into incredible numbers. Your GPU would not just have to render the immediate area around you but virtual miles of trees, dense grass & vegetation, objects, buildings, characters, water, (...). Needless to say it looks incredible (tested it myself). However, killing off LOD will cripple any card you can throw at the software.

From my recollection, not enough Crysis dares it.

Candlejack

I can't be bothered, PhysX practically did nothing for me when I had it. Waste of money. I wish I waited on buying my HD3870 x2 to see a GPU/PhysX intergration that actually works. Havok seems to be the best source of in game softwore for for Physics, looking at all the current games. But, then again, If you just keep waiying to buy a graphics card, your never going to buy one.

I think I'm happy with my HD3870 X2, it's more powerful then any graphics card on the market, and beats the 8800Ultra which costs over 200$ more. at 450$ it's about the best deal I've ever seen for awhile.

Ejvid04

That's kind of a cheap shot at AMD in my honest opinion.

Papa Midnight

@WolvenOne: The gpu market is thriving. And it's going to be a while before we get to having $50 cards that can render 5760*3240 at 90 fps. Besides, with people falling in love with Alienware's new curved, big-ass monitor, and increased interests in insanely large screens, not having enough stuff to calculate isn't going to be a problem. But yeah, more stuff bundled up with a gpu is going to be good.

nman

If they had just stuck to liscencing software, instead of selling expensive shit, they could have stayed alive. Then again, built in physics would mean more powerful cards, so I guess it's a win-win. No if they could just hurry up and get a dedicated sound and networking solution along with the graphics and physics, we could see a spike in people with good audio and local ethernet faster that 10/100.

nman

This, actually didn't surprise me, for a very simple reason. Nvidia had no choice.

The the PC video card market is in trouble. Sure it may seem fine now, but it's becoming increasingly obvious that the cards are becoming more powerful faster than the programmers can ramp up their code. It's not at a critical point right now, but four to five years from now GPU's will be so powerful that neither the monitor nor the human eye would be able to, "perceive," all the extra pixels they're outputting. *You can only ramp up frames per second and resolution so high before neither the eye or monitor can keep up.*

To avoid this fate, Nvidia has to expand the capabilities of the video card to cover things other than just graphics. You can to see the outlining of this when Nvidia started leaking plans to integrate sound cards into the GPU, and when they tried, *unsuccessfully,* to turn GPU's into a physics accelerator.

Buying Ageia, is merely another go at it. This time however, it's liable to succeed. The Ageia PPU's are not actually all that extensive in terms of bandwidth of computing power, and if they're integrated into GPU's it's highly likely they could be simplified somewhat by taking advantage of similar components that already exist in the GPU. The also get access to a good Physics engine, and a R&D team that, when properly funded should be about on par with Havok, which Intel bought some time ago.

So yeah, none of this actually surprises me. In fact I've been waiting for Nvidia to make this move for quite some time. I was actually somewhat surprised they didn't do it any sooner.

WolvenOne

Graphics AND Physics...rolled together into one hot, sweaty ball of silicon? Oh, those Luna demos are going to be AWESOME!

boopadoo

Ageia's physics cards were a good idea, but a really tough sell. Just like back in the day when being able to offload 3D handling to it's own card, offloading the physics in a game to a separate processor gives you a lot more spare CPU cycles for other fun things like A.I. If it is combines with a graphics card even if more expensive it will be able to break into the market.

Physics in games right now is really just a sad joke. Almost everything you see in most games nowadays isn't physics, but programming tricks to create foux physics. That's why a couch can stop bullets or when a person dies in a corner he looks like a victim from the manhattan experiments with his head and legs half in the wall. Real (or semi) physics in games can add a whole layer of realism (if thats what you're looking for) to games that just isn't there today.

Physics are a hard sell for games currently, but once they become more prevailant and pervasive expect to start seeing some really amazing things.... Oh, and I'm excited about the potential for this unholy union of graphics and physics. wooo! wooo! Pew! Pew!

lostalaska

@infi: Only as long as you don't look at the 8800GT for £20 more, let alone the GTS 512MB. They slaughter anything ATi has to offer except the HD3870 X2.

[images.tomshardware.com]
[images.tomshardware.com]

BTW, my new card is at the top of those two charts (:

Candlejack

Industry leaders?

Thats Havok isnt it?

good old irish corpse tumbling fun.

EdwinJ85

@Heartwork:
they made quite a hit with the HD38xx actually

infi

i can honestly see nothing but good from this. Ageia physics engine may not be mind blowing but it is pretty efficient.

NessD12

But BFG (maybe some others too) is still making and selling licensed PhysX cards. I don't want to be the guy to sort that mess out.

Candlejack

Seriously though it would be nice if they can combine 2 cards into 1. Since the less things I have shoved into my "oven" the better.

Witzbold

@DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]: Yeah that would be a significant problem, but if AMD can buy ATI I'm sure nVidia could be allowed to buy AMD. Maybe! ;)

photoboy

Two thumbs up! I want to see more games take advantage of (good) physics technology, and this is a good way to encourage it.

Adam Rock

@Lixie: Simple, physics is the new reason to get more processing power into your box. i.e. it sells silicon.

NotZed

A combined GPU and physics accelerator doesn't sound too far-fetched. It's also good to remember that already lots of stuff traditionally calculated by the CPU is moving to the GPU. NVIDIA is effectively stopping a competitor while acquiring their technology. I actually doubt they'll bother with a separate card, and instead just add physx-compatibility to the GeForce series or something similar.

kryo

@sugardeath: Nope, AMD bought ATI.

Although people were thinking that after AMD acquired ATI, nothing has happened.

Yami

I'm glad. Hopefully this means half the new gaming PCs will come with PhysX along with their GFX card. That means better physics (of course) and better AI since it's freeing up processor cycles.

NeverSage

@DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]:

Not as long as the others are still viable alternatives.

Morberis

Go Nvidia!! This is good news! Now when will we see CellFactor for Ps3/360?

Ali

I recall Nvidia talking up using their GPU's as physics modelers for gaming soon after Ageia shipped their first card. This was not surprising considering they already have a line of high-performance parallel computing cards/PC's called Tesla and a SDK, CUDA, which is used for financial modeling and oil exploration. I think this aquisition might have more to do with eliminating the chance that Ageia might move into that market.

aka Bitter

@Witzbold: yeah we all wish just wait soon we will all be paying double, but hey I could be wrong well I hope I am.

Tzero7

Hahaha oh man, as if ATI wasn't getting slaughtered in the GPU market enough already. Now this!

Heartwork

@photoboy: I would imagine Anti-trust laws would take effect to stop the monopoly.

DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]

Why the hell not? Packard Bell used to put sound/graphics/modem on one card back in the day. And those were the cheapest ass, ghetto computers you could buy!

thefuryone

Of course it's entirely possible that Nvidia made this move, not to make use of the technology, but to put an end to it.

"Buy him out, boys!"

V1L3

@Lixie:

Intel bought Havok... Nvidia bought Ageia... but wait? Didn't intel buy nvidia? o_O

sugardeath

Thank the diety of your choice. Honestly, I was never able to validate buying a second card because... well, I already bought the one. I see gravity in action constantly. I'm not going to shell out extra cash to see super-extra-gravity in a game.

Asper

Re: Would it be possible to put a graphics chip and a physics chip on the same board?

Probably yes. They could do a setup like the 7900 (or upcoming 9800 GX2) or whatever the ATI version is with a PCI bridge chip. Instead of adding a second GPU behind the bridge, they could add a physics chip.

Now would they want to do this? I'd go with very, very doubtful.

Franklin Comes Alive!

OH NO. AMD better find someone to buy to compete now. *waves ATI foam finger*

DARK DVNT [XBL];8908-2379-8728-6953 [Wii]

@demonwolf:

Integrated GPU's on motherboards I guess.

Morberis

@TheHun: *i meant card

TheHun

so what's a physics engine for? I just don't get it

TheHun

After all the bullshit from ATI and nVidia about using a spare graphics card to do physics on GPU it looks like nVidia are taking the easy way out. Given nVidia's massive resources at the moment and AMD's relative fall in value it wouldn't surprise me to see them buy AMD either. nVidia need a CPU line they can call their own, with Intel developing their own GPUs it won't be long before Intel doesn't need AMD(ATI) or nVidia.

photoboy

@Nirolak:

I think they still do, don't they? I mean they just released Warmonger specifically to show off what the card can do and to increase sales - because to be honest even on low on a killer system the fps is beneath 20.

Morberis

Terrible idea for NVIDIA. I have a physx card, and it is utterly useless-- even in games that support it. In physx-based games, the physx effects are bottlenecked by the PPU-- the damn card is too weak to power things built FOR it.

Their physics engine is great, though. Definitely on par with havok, and apparently it is MUCH cheaper to license. Perhaps NVIDIA hopes to get all the good things about the physx card onto their next videocards, and begin to optimize the engine for their cards. That'd be a sickening blow to AMD/ATI if it became widely supported.

Harmatia

so what's ati/amd's answer?

demonwolf

Combining 2 cards = the price of 2 cards for one?

Witzbold

It will be nice to see a graphics card with an on-board physics process built-in as long as the physics processor does not add overly to the price (and that more games support physics processors, but Nvidia should be able to take care of that).

Lstormy10

Can't wait to see what wonderful beautys this new relationship will spawn.

Tzero7

@Lixie: Well, actually AGEIA did make a physics hardware card at one point but it didn't seem to go over to well.

Nirolak

At least nobody was hurt

LordChris915

Lets hope this means no more stand alone physics cards for us to buy.

Irenicus-the one and only

@MasterOfPastures:
Q1 '09

FearlessUser

Really? What has Ageia done thats profitable though? They have Physics card which isn't gaining mainstream attention and they made a game to work with the physics card.

How is Nvidia benefiting from this?

Sub

DAMN! No they di-ent!
When can I expect my GeForce 100000005600 with built-in gravity emulator and worm-hole vortex?

MasterOfPastures

I thought Nvidia was big on the doing physics based calculations using a GPU, though I guess Ageia could end up working on that.

I agree with Justhesh, I can only see good things coming from this.

Morberis

Intel bought Havok. NVIDIA bought AGEIA. Can someone enlighten us as to why computer hardware manufactures are buying physics engines?

Lixie

this would give them another advantage when it comes to driver-support. you can bet the nvidia cards would be optimised like hell for games using the proprietary physx middleware

MrSoursop

Sounds like this would lead to nothing but good things.

justhesh

It's... Beautiful......

Maniclysane

OMG, can you imagine the video/physics cards to come in the future after this merger? I, nor my wallet, certainly cannot!

NinjaBurg3r

@gamecrazychris: I'd probably smell it (DX11) more if it was Microsoft doing the buying. But it's possible that nvidia may do that. But since this physics engine isn't as widely supported as say.. Havok as far as I can tell it may not make that big an impact. intel seems to be intent on doing physics using multiple cpus and I read they put an end to havokfx. Maybe nvidia bought AGEIA more for the software than for the hardware.

smoke_tetsu

The difference between Havok and PhsyX, is that AGEIA has their own hardware available, while Havok is just the engine (which isn't even really all that powerful).

Also, this is big for nvidia and AGEIA. Games may not of supported the AGEIA Physx card strictly on the basis that no one's really heard of them, but I'd imagine that developers are more likely to take notice when nvidia's name is on it.

I would look to see nvidia add in a PPU onto some of their newer cards, and push the physics aspect pretty hard on developers.

jynxycat

I just bought a AMD 3870X2 :) But as for the take over. Meh

i think it will take a year to see any hybrid PPU/GPU combo ?

Id would have prefered ageia to keep as a company

Now we are going to get very expensive cards....

dom101010

Doesn't PhysX only work with like one game or something?

Maybe if it was incorporated I would buy a videocard with this feature for about $50 extra. But there'd had to something else to play than GRAW2...

Malmer

@homernoy:

No no no no NO.

I'm sorry, but you've just demonstrated your ignorance. No industry, "NONE WHATSOEVER," has ever managed to use the same business model forever. Heck, no company has even managed to hold onto the same business model after a couple decades. So what makes you think that the GPU market is unique? How do you expect companies like Nvidia and AMD to overcome the fact that that both monitors and eyes have a set limit so how much detail they can resolve?

So they're just going to hit that limit and keep making more powerful cards? And people will buy them, even though they make no difference whatsoever and would be a huge waste of money? However about the fact that even the game developers are hitting financial and time-restriction roadblocks that are preventing them from going graphics gung-ho even now? How about the fact that even Id says they will not dramatically up the visuals in their games until after the successor to the PS3 and X-box 360 come to the market?

You haven't actually countered any of this. You've simply acted exasperated and declared that I'm wrong, and that the GPU party will continue forever.

Look, I think this cycle does have to continue for a little longer. There are some technologies out there, like advanced physics engines, that eventually will have a huge impact on gameplay.

But nothing lasts forever. The cycle must inevitably end someday, and frankly, when that happens, I'll be glad. Cause it means that we'll be able to stop arguing over things like, who has the best PC, or what console is the biggest baddest renderer on the block.

It'll just be about the games. Or perhaps what platform has the best control scheme. In either case, it'll be a heck of a lot more substantiative than arguing about which platform has the most transistors.

WolvenOne

@Lixie:

They are converned with graphics. If they can have a company focus on physics while they work on graphics, and they are both the "same" company, then it works out to the advantage of both.

Now all we need is a merger of Intel and nVidia. Imagine the possibilities. Intel + GeForce + Havok + PhysX! ATI would be soooo screwed, and so would AMD, who they're merged with.

That begs the question: should I wait for an upgraded PhysX card, or buy the one out now?

Codexx

This is an great venture for NVIDIA. This will certainly raise the PC gaming level up to new heights.

@NinjaBurg3r: One can only imagine my friend. Only time will tell...

iLoV

on every game I've tested the 'power' of the Ageia PhysX card with.... I've gotten WORSE framerates.....

nVidia are idiots, even more so than before...... >,>

MySoul7