ATI start talking about Physics processing on graphic cards!

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...005202331.html

In other news, AGEIA poos it's pants ;)


I'm much much more in favour of an integrated approach - i've no desire to spend another 300quid on a PPU..

"During a demonstration of Crossfire ATI displayed an interesting demo which put the Crossfire cards to an alternative use. As opposed to having the Crossfire boards increasing performance by distributing graphics workloads across the two ATI has a demo with wave simulations that could be fully calculated on the CPU, have the CPU calculating the physics and the graphics rendering the image, or moving the rendering to one board and the physics of the wave simulation to the second graphics board, effectively turning it into a physics co-processor."

http://www.beyond3d.com/reviews/ati/r520/index.php?p=08

How is this GD related? :)

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Originally Posted by David

How is this GD related? :)

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Opps b*gger :) Perhaps a nice mod can move it for me ? :)

not GD related but interesting none the less.

Hmm, graphics card cores are designed to calculate graphics, they're not general purpose x86 CPU's, AFAIK. I'd be dubious of physics processing done on a graphics card, I imagine it'd need a hell of a lot of software support, and since Nvidia probably wouldn't do it to the same standard, it'd mean either you'd have physics calculated in some games and not others due to your brand choice, or game prices would have to go up for all the extra card specific coding.

No-one adheres to standards anymore :(

PPU's aren't generalized processors tho - that's the point. Specialization allows you to gear up for particular processing. I suspect that PPU's and GPU's are far more related than we might think..

Hmm, anyone with enough knowledge to answer that I'd be intrested in. I don't know alot about the architecture of GPU's, I just wouldn't expect them to be a patch on a specific PPU, we'll see though.