What is the state of play with Ageia's PhysX - 18 months after launch?

[charleski]

I remember hearing some vague mutterings about Nvidia or was it ATi planning on latching their own brand of physics processor onto their flagship range of GPUs about a year ago when PhysX was about a month old to consumers.

You're probably talking about Havok FX: announced with much hoopla 18 months ago, and now no longer listed on Havok's website. (Havok does the physics middleware for many game engines, including Source, and it's all CPU-based.)

That's why I believe GPU-based physics acceleration solutions are stillborn. I think ATI announced something similar at the time which has also vanished off the face of the earth.

[BEANFro Elite]

You're probably talking about Havok FX: announced with much hoopla 18 months ago, and now no longer listed on Havok's website. (Havok does the physics middleware for many game engines, including Source, and it's all CPU-based.)

That's why I believe GPU-based physics acceleration solutions are stillborn. I think ATI announced something similar at the time which has also vanished off the face of the earth.

You never know, it may resurface much like SLi did even though I'm aware the original SLi technique was very different, but you see what I'm getting at

I think an onboard physics processor would be more practical for consumer uptake etc.

[dangel]

Physx would have more of a chance if bundled onto a graphics board no doubt. But there's interesting times ahead - cpu/gpu convergence and even the prospect of massively multi-core processors doing real-time raytracing will really shake up things. Fun stuff.

[0iD]

Well out of inqisitiveness, I purchased one from Scan. Well they're seeling on fleabay for roughly the same price as Scan anyway, so i'll have little trouble shifting it if it's pants. I mean, I can't have a proper opinion on it if I've never tried it?

Anyhoo, played thro the Exclusive Ageia Island demo level in GRAW2 and I'm quite impressed I must say by the effects it brings (similar to those seen on Crysis promo vids where you can shoot trees into secions etc). New deformable environments (now emerging in most new games anyway) are quite cool, grenading wood cabins into a spray of splinters & shooting bad guys through wooden fences I like. Also, shooting ladders out as an enemy is climbing down, & watching him fall to his demise was also a grin.

Though not actually enhancing gameplay per-se, I'm going to keep it on the strength of that & see how UT3 differs with/without it too.

[Andrzej]

...GPU-based physics acceleration solutions are stillborn...

Think you may be right. In a follow up segment on Ageia (to be released around the time Warmonger is launched), I think we have Dan saying as much on camera.
No doubt the processing power of GPUs...
...but who is making the API ?
Also, if the GPU does the physics, then - surely - the 'things' it creates do not exist ?
With a PPU and/or CPU based solution, then the 'things' are 'real' as opposed to a more realistic effect.
The Stanford/Folding etc projects are different - and I think the GPGPU side of things will go 'BIG GUNS' into the future... but not sure about 'true' physics - especially with Intel aiming to ship an ~80-core CPU well inside 10 years !

...enhancing gameplay per-se, I'm going to keep it...

PLUS you get to play Warmonger free of charge any time now when it is released

...DirectX API for physics...

Word reached my ears a while back that this one 'died in committee' over in Redmond