Ageia PhysX PPU

[vrykyl]

Have you seen how much circuitry is on a modern sound card? It'd need to be about as big as a GeForce 7900 to hold a PPU too

true...but most cases have room lets face it, itd be shorter than a current 7900gx2 tho surely

Seriously tho...where do they expect us to put all these add in cards? and at what cost? its no wonder the average Joe picks up a console instead

[Paranoid2000]

Another point to consider is the smaller number of games that would benefit from improved physics processing. There aren't many games currently that don't benefit from graphics acceleration (like 2-D puzzle games and some wargames) so a graphics card gives benefits across the board. However for physics cards, we are looking almost exclusively at First-Person Shooter/RPG games - RTS, TBS and adventure games would struggle to make more than a marginal use of them.

This does seem to be part of a general trend of a slowdown in visible improvements - the first step from non-accelerated to accelerated graphics had the greatest impact (no more pixellation/blockiness) while subsequent innovations (anti-aliasing, anisotropic filtering, T&L, pixel/vertex shaders) have made smaller improvements. Now reviews are focusing on relatively small changes like different levels of AA/AF, transparency AA or soft shadows. Enhanced physics effects seems likely to be another such - the sharp-eyed will notice and appreciate them (like an audiophile appreciates the difference between CD-audio and SACD/DVD-A) but for many more, they will be largely unnoticed.

[dangel]

Well I suppose the original 'accelerator' for graphics - the S3 Virge - was rubbish too
I remember well how you could do things faster in software at the time.. Yikes.

[geo]

Certainly reallyphysics has a right to an opinion, and I think his comment on the appropriate manner/apps/tools/paradigm to be benchmarking Ageia with is a valid item for discussion in the community.

But to be banging on "objectivity" as he does, with its flavor of not just "Hey, maybe you need to think of this a bit differently" but rather "you're the kind of guy who doesn't give new products a fair shake". . . .while hiding his own apparent connection to the company. . .is. . .well. . . extremely sleazy.

Mew market/hardware niches means thinking things through for everybody, and that takes time, dialogue, and good will, to happen effectively. Throwing down the "you're not objective" card is not helpful to that process.

[digitalwanderer]

Not really meant as pimpage, but it seems to fit in with this thread...

I posted up this story about an Ageia shill I discovered the other day:

Like so many things, it started out with a post over at Beyond3D...

If your interested in hardware or software modding please send a reply. Im in need of some very expirienced and professional modders to work on the latest technology. I cant reviel too much at this time but if you reply with some info about yourself and what makes you qualified i can give out more.

Thankyou

DeathKnight posted up that an identical post was over at Rage3D, and I got a bit curious about who this "snickenhoven" was so I googled a bit and found this:

Have any of you checked out the new PhysX by Ageia. It looks amazing. I cant wait for it to come out. Its like a superboost for your computer. It boosts everything to maximum performance.

You should really check it out if your hoping to make like GOD.

Remember The PhysX by Ageia :shock: !

Posted up at RPG, Hard, and BFG...

As well as the post at B3D & R3D from today over at ExtremeTech and MadShrimp.

Anyone else smell something a bit not-quite-righteous?

That tied in with Rys' discovery here is just filling me with not-good feelings about Ageia and the PPU.

[The Baron]

I'll be a Nice Guy and ignore the viral marketing accusations at the moment. Ah, who am I kidding? Of course I won't. It's pathetically clear from the start that this is someone connected to Ageia, even if you ignore the IP lookup, simply because no one with a clue could say this with a straight face.

I believe the review from Hexus was particularly harsh with Ageia and so not objective or neutral, and could be misleading. As always, it is easier to do a negative review as it appears the reviewer is setting a high standard and is beyond reproach. The benchmark, however is irrelevant or imappropriate (Frames Per Second measures visual response - here you are measuring interaction of physical objects) - You don't use a rendering benchmark for physics.

No other metric exists to measure physics performance, which is Ageia's fault. Why haven't they released information on general-purpose PPU programming with the PhysX chip? I'd buy four right now if I could use it as a dedicated vector processor, but that's beside the point. So, if we're not supposed to judge it in frames per second, since OBVIOUSLY the only POSSIBLE bottleneck there is the video card, how do we judge it? Now let's see, what runs on the PhysX chip? Games. How do you measure game performance? Frames per second. Oh wait, that's not allowed! Let's all just look at it for a minute and go with our gut response--that's what makes an objective review.

Virtually no one was thinking of doing physics in hardware, until these guys at Ageia showed up and disproved the skeptics. I went to the GDC and was impressed and hope to be at the E3 - hope to buy the card by an etail channel soon. I think many games will embrace Ageia hardware ... (if the games want to be differentiated) and here is why. Why would a game publisher continue to pay the software company - an alternative middleware company is called Havok, thousands of dollars and a royalty for each game, when the Ageia guys can give the physics software stack free? A recent report indicated game publishers are running out of ideas (including EA) to set them apart from the competition. Guess what, here is physics. Also, history has proved that specialized functions are best done in hardware - CPU companies tried their best to do everything including 3Dgraphics and then came 3Dfx with a separate processor and then NVidia and so on. In the same manner here is a new category called PhysX or Physics that can be specialized (done) in hardware. They will always do better than trying to compromise the functions in CPU or GPU. Hope to see more relevant objective reviews from Hexus.

Clearly, since Ageia had a novel idea (although not really--"Hey, they do physics on software, let's do it in hardware because that's so new and different!" What?), that means their implementation is above reproach. In fact, let's just go ahead and take back all the crappy things we said about the Voodoo Rush, Voodoo3, and Voodoo5 because 3dfx had a cool idea at one point too. And game companies "running out of ideas"--LOL. "We need to set ourselves apart from the competition! Let's all use physics!"

Ugh, I don't really have a problem with companies plugging their products on forums (everybody has an agenda of some sort), but they should at least be open about it and not try to imitate your average PS3/XB360 fanboy. Let the engineers talk about it on forums, explain why we don't have a GPPPU interface, specific hardware implementation, etc. Not this PR bull****. This is just ridiculous.

[Steve A]

they should at least be open about it and not try to imidate your average PS3/XB360 fanboy. Let the engineers talk about it on forums, explain why we don't have a GPPPU interface, specific hardware implementation, etc.

im not techie enough to understand the whole post .. but i 100% agree above mentioned quote

[shaithis]

As I said when these were first announced: They are marketing these devices at the wrong sector.

If they really do what they claim, they should be used in real-world modelling simulation for industrial applications, not for Doom.

I really fail to see how anyone could notice the difference between real physics and the pseudo-physics that games use now.........although some people will, especially after spending 200quid on it A good A/B test is the only way to judge these devices and I would have money on the fact the results would be inconclusive.

[geo]

Why, for instance, is it impossible to configure GRAW to do the physics on the CPU so we could have the apples-to-apples comparison that reallyphysics claims to want? If that was Ubisoft's decision, then fine --they don't have a responsibility to provide the best benchmark possible. Otoh, if Ageia either required them or pressured them into not making it possible to produce the extra physics in cpu-only mode, then who's fault is it that we don't have an apples-to-apples benchmark?

I'd really like to know the answer to that. The unstated assumption (well, unstated until just now) is that it would be relatively trivial to make cpu-only available in GRAW with an .ini switch or something of that nature, and Ubisoft would have no reason of their own to not do so --and maybe a few more sales if they did from the curious, even if the performance sucked in that mode (it would of course be defaulted OFF). If that's wrong, and a signficant amount of work is required to make both available, then it is a different story. . .

[TheAnimus]

I think geo, what ageia have done, is to provide a physics engine which is free to use, this is damn clever, because they get to control the performance of the software one.

also games developers see a hudge cash saving by using their engine, and get to put a symbol on the box which will make people more likely to buy it. Games dev's might be scared rather like in the old days, no OpenGL/Direct3D/3DFX logo, no buyie

[The Baron]

Why, for instance, is it impossible to configure GRAW to do the physics on the CPU so we could have the apples-to-apples comparison that reallyphysics claims to want? If that was Ubisoft's decision, then fine --they don't have a responsibility to provide the best benchmark possible. Otoh, if Ageia either required them or pressured them into not making it possible to produce the extra physics in cpu-only mode, then who's fault is it that we don't have an apples-to-apples benchmark?

I'd really like to know the answer to that.

Ah, the elephant in the room. "Is the PhysX card, in its current state, doing absolutely anything?" We don't even know the answer to that, much less "does the PhysX card do any real acceleration?" The whole thing just feels insubstantial at the moment at best. No public SDK (ga-whaaaa?), poor drivers at best, lackluster game support... I'm not impressed in the least.

[stone_cold_Jimi]

'k all, system specs:

AMD x2 4600 @ 3 GHz / Vapo LS
DFI UT Lanparty SLI-DR Expert
2GB G.Skill HZ
2x PoV 7800GT SLI
BFG Ageia PhysX
WD 74GB Raptor
Samsung Spinpoint 200GB
Plextor 716AL
CoolerMaster RP 550W PSU
Viewsonic 924 19" LCD

Just a quick question - has the reviewer yet tried the CellFactor demo? I've been playing with this for a couple of evenings and now that I've updated all my gfx drivers, I have to say that it is simply, jaw-droppingly, awesome. This takes gaming into the next generation imho. I'm awaiting my copy of GR:AW this week and tbh not expecting it to come close.

How about a review based on CellFactor? Do this hardware the justice it deserves, because based on that demo, I'm sold on it.

[Kumagoro]

From skim reading it seems that to get the most from these thing you need to have
really powerful Graphics cards i.e the bottle neck is the GPU?
Is the level of physics adjustable to stop the frame rate dropping to low?

Making a few assumptions, is it then the case that perhaps it wont be necessary to
upgrade PPUs for quite a while.

[digitalwanderer]

Just a quick question - has the reviewer yet tried the CellFactor demo? I've been playing with this for a couple of evenings and now that I've updated all my gfx drivers, I have to say that it is simply, jaw-droppingly, awesome. This takes gaming into the next generation imho. I'm awaiting my copy of GR:AW this week and tbh not expecting it to come close.

How about a review based on CellFactor? Do this hardware the justice it deserves, because based on that demo, I'm sold on it.

A couple of questions, which detonators and which Ageia driver set are you using and what kind of framerate hit did hardware physics have on the title?

I'd be real interested in some numbers if you have the time, you obviously got a decent enough set-up to test it on.

[stone_cold_Jimi]

A couple of questions, which detonators and which Ageia driver set are you using and what kind of framerate hit did hardware physics have on the title?

I'd be real interested in some numbers if you have the time, you obviously got a decent enough set-up to test it on.

nVidia 84.21 Forceware Int; global settings with quality at "performance" and SLI-multi GPU.

Ageia:
Windows driver 1.0.1.0
PhysX engines 2.3.1 - 2.3.3; 2.4.0, 2.4.1, 2.4.3; 2.4.9CellFactor

I'll have to set up RivaTuner to get framerates. Heat is the biggest difference so far; the lead GPU is hitting 75C, 10C more than with any other game. It makes the graphics work hard, lots of moving objects to render. I'll have a play with some AA and AF and mess with the in-game HDR as well. Per-pixel blur works very well with these drivers, was about 1fps with the 81.xx ones.

Having played UT2k4 for nearly 2 years now (online 32 player Onslaught mostly), last October I set myself the task of building a machine for UT2k7. This is the 8th CPU, 3rd mobo etc etc. It's pretty settled now; I'm pleased with the PhysX so far and it seems, judging by comments at E3, to fit the purpose of the rig.

[geo]

FS has some interesting results here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/..._ppu/page4.asp

Look at X1900 regular vs X1900 CF. I mean, the good news is that Ageias "driver fix" seems to have helped, certainly for single-card. The bad news is the CF scores would suggest that either the PPU or the interrelationship between the PPU and CPU is where the performance constraint is.