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

MySoul7

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 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

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

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

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

smoke_tetsu

gamecrazychris

"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

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

topaz420

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

"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

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

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

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

jerrt

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

okenny :) ...building bridges (to hide under)

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 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

Papa Midnight

nman

nman

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

boopadoo

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

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

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

Candlejack

Thats Havok isnt it?

good old irish corpse tumbling fun.

EdwinJ85

infi

NessD12

Candlejack

Witzbold

photoboy

Adam Rock

$Bill$G$

kryo

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

Yami

NeverSage

Not as long as the others are still viable alternatives.

Morberis

Ali

aka Bitter

Tzero7

残心

DARK DVNT; DARKDVNT [Xfire/Yahoo/Aim] ;Plz visit my website, k, thx.

thefuryone

"Buy him out, boys!"

V1L3

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

sugardeath

Señor Vorpal Kickass'o

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!

Integrated GPU's on motherboards I guess.

Morberis

DARK DVNT; DARKDVNT [Xfire/Yahoo/Aim] ;Plz visit my website, k, thx.

TheHun

TheHun

photoboy

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

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

demonwolf

Witzbold

Lstormy10

Tzero7

Nirolak

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

iLoV

LordChris915

Irenicus-the one and only

FearlessUser

How is Nvidia benefiting from this?

Sub

MasterOfPastures

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

Morberis

Lixie

MrSoursop

justhesh

Maniclysane

NinjaBurg3r