I had a discussion on youtube (actually) on 3 full pages about this, and would like to hear what others think.

Here is the discussion from youtube (slightly edited to remove
misunderstandings and things that are unrelated)*the continuity can be a tad messed up, as youtube's comments go upwards instead of downwards*:

DutchManticore

I am SURE that my PC will run this crap properly.

Can you send me the app? So I can prove it?


Graylord88
No matter your specs, it wont.

You need the hardware for the software to be fully compatible.

DutchManticore
That's what they said about that one demonstration game... Blabla Revolution (CellFactor or something?) and I found a way to launch it without the PPU within 2 days and it ran perfectly.. INCLUDING the cloth shit.

Ageia was thought of when dual and quadcores didn't exist yet. Now that dual and quadcores are so within reach ageia is obsolete.

Graylord88
1. The cpu has lots of other tasks to take care of rather than only physics.
2. PhysX has a lot MORE stuff to it than the average physics in game engines has.
There is 2 versions of physX hardware driven and software driven, the software driven is heavily simplified compared to if you got the hardware.
3.Its an ENGINE, meaning it is NOT obsolete, you get more Physics with it, it's not about performance!
4. Please research before you post things you obviously don't know about.

DutchManticore
1. Yes.. namely Physics / General Processing & Background operations / Texture loading / Graphic support.

Those are 4 tasks.. a Quadcore has 4 CPU's. End of story. The game Alan Wake will implement this and it will allow physics equal if not better than those of Ageia.

2. PhysX has cloth-simulation / bendable metal and interactive foliage as its flags.
None of those are exclusively to PhysX. CryEngine has interactive foliage / GRiD will have bendable metal (YES REAL TIME) and cloth simulation is already being run perfectly on my quadcore in CellFactor (proving that an physx acceleration isn't needed to run it.)

3. What is your point? Yes it is an engine.. but I don't see how that guarantees it's NOT obsolete? The engine that ran Quake 1 is an engine... does that also make it NOT obsolete?

What's your point?

Graylord88
PhysX is not a game engine, its a Physics engine.
It is not obsolete when it comes to physics as ageia is specializing in physics, the results are also alot better than the average engines.

Also you seem to think that 4 cores means 4 times more efficiency, which is not true.

You also have very impressive realtime fluids.
Which you do not have in the other engines.
People say that Cryengine has awesome fluids, but it is pre-animated, not realtime calculated, meaning that you can not directly interact with it for instance.

You also have alot MORE ongoing physics at the same time with PhysX.
The average engine/cpu can handle alot less at the same time.

Many games uses PhysX software, and it is still increasing, for full effect, you need a PPU, not for performance, but the software uses the specific PPU for for instance calculating things that a CPU is not made for.

And yes, you can run cellfactor without the ppu, but you only get the software version, which is heavily simplified.

DutchManticore
Name one thing that is more complicated on the PPU accelerated version?!

Graylord88
Chaos theory

Oh, and by the way, quad cores are currently obsolete, since fewer games than which supports ageia physx supports 4 cores.

PhysX is DEDICATED to physics, meaning there is a lot more to it (along with quality)than the average engine.

"PhysX has cloth-simulation / bendable metal and interactive foliage as its flags."

Yes, those are a few of them.
You also have realistic ripping cloth, deformable objects, breaking objects, softbodies, debree that actually have a source spot where they originally were, there is also a lot more that i can not remember right here and right now.

All in all you have a lot more realism to it.

DutchManticore

Cloth simulation is the same as realistic ripping cloth. Bendable metal is the same as deformable objects (see Race Drive GRID), Debree with a source spot in available in SO many games... and softbodies don't even have any use

They demonstrate it with the red cow...which also runs perfectly on my PC.

That means that a PPU is obsolete and unnecessary. Which was my original statement... my statement wasn't that the PhysX engine sucks.. but that a PPU is VERY unnecessary.

Graylord88

Games have specifical physx for them alone, but with physX you get them all at once.

DutchManticore
No. Only in games with the PhysX engine .
Seriously? Are you claiming that a PPU actually ADDS physics to games?!

Common...

Graylord88
It adds physics to games it supports yes, thats the whole point of it.

I think you missed the whole point of the physX card if you thought otherwise.

DutchManticore
Obsolete means that something better is available you know that huh?

Cause this sentence implies otherwise.
And a quadcore is handy even if it isn't supported by a game. Currently most games use 2 cores, true. But if those 2 cores are being used by a game.. the other two cores are still available for other stuff such as music with winamp / burning a cd or whatever you wanna do

It's awesome.

Graylord88
But nothing better is available...?

DutchManticore

I was saying Quadcore > PPU the whole time... :\

Graylord88
And i am saying that that the PPU does things the CPU cannot, a cpu can NOT calcutate chaos theory! But so does the ppu!

Simply put, if you want good physics, buy a PPU.
You don't have to have either one of them, to get most of it you should have both.

And by the way, a 4quad does not give 4 times more efficiency.
Every core does about 35% of 1 main core alone, meaning a total of 140% efficiency, although, as long as only 2 of them are usable, the other two are obselete.
and gives us a total of... 70% effiency...
Dual cores have about 60% effiency per core, and as most applications can only use 2 core... Well i guess you can calculate that one on your own .

Why the two remaining cores are obsolete? Well, as long as the application does not support 4 cores, even if 1 application uses 2 cores, then another application that uses only 2 cores will still use the same cores as the first application, it will not automatically use the 2 others.

Only 4 core applications will actually use those 2 last cores.

iv been looking round a lot, and it seems to all be the same issue - there arent enough games which support PhysX, and PhysX really needs a big-release title to fully show what it is capable of. I mean, i own, or have owned and sold well over 50 games, and played upwards of 20 demos, and so far, only 1 game i own supports PhysX, and that is MOH: Airborne.

but i have one question, which as of yet has not been answered. If a game does not support PhysX in any way, such as Crysis (big fan =]), would the in game physics still be handed to the CPU and GPU, or would it be sorted by the PPU? Id guess that it just wouldn't recognize the PPU at all, but iv been very wrong before.

would a PPU make much difference to my pc? Im running an old pent. 4ht at 3ghz (single core), and a XFX 8800gts. My mobo sucks ass, i945, and yes its a Dell Dimension =[

just in case anyone is interested, i would recommend the 8800gts to anyone, and especially the XFX version as it has a lifetime guarantee (10 years in the UK)

I am pretty sure games not supporting PhysX does not recognize the PPU, i am not 100% sure though.

Also, i agree, it need more games to it, but when the physics themselves are compared to rival engines... it's unique.

I myself, have a PhysX P1, by now they are quite cheap.

Although few games have PhysX support, i just enjoy sitting down a moment and experiment with the unique possibilities it has.

I personally know little about the PhysX card, but my current understanding is that, yes, they are obsolete, but to an extent. New high-end vid cards have PhysX capabilities built-in, but this requires the card to do more work. If you have the PhysX card this will releive stress on the vid card. They are not necessary, but handy if you only have one video card.

I think that if you want neat looking Physics, buy a PPU.
Don't just flame it right away like we see on places as youtube and don't listen to rumors.
Neither any CPU nor GPU can do the same as a PPU.

They do not only relieve stress, but if you got the hardware you get a lot more debree, ripping cloth, realistic fluids etc in-game and a lot more of it at the same time.
In only software mode you do get Physics, but they are heavily simplified.

Well, if you're going to have a video card with physics built-in, supposedly you're going to have to have it as an extra card; you'll need an sli or crossfire hookup (nVidia or ATI, respectively), otherwise the framerate will drop terribly.
You know that nVidia ended up buying the rights to Ageia or something like that... in any case, any PhysX cards coming out in the future you can probably expect to be engineered a lot better

Now that was a good move in that it may help preserve the Ageia line continually, and at the same time even furthering it, rather than having it wiped out by ATI/Havok engine, which in my opinion seem inferior. I suppose Havok could be modified to be every bit as effective, but the Havok games I've played have been basically just a shadow of real-time physics. You can get some nice real-time ragdoll effects, but I haven't seen much else, which is typical of the CPU-powered engines.

ATI also was smart in trying to integrate physics, but there is a clear distinction now in both graphics cards now AND their physics engines, which might actually be a problem from game to game; to me, that is probably the worst part of it...

Yeah, nvidia bought Ageia.
But also that Nvidia actually bought it means that Nvidia has seen the potential in it.

Truly!

I guess what I was also implying by that part is that the physx card in its current state is actually not a relatively advanced card. It has 128mb and it only uses a standard PCI slot for bandwidth. Granted, the memory is GDDR3, but what I'm saying is that the hardware itself could be even better to accomodate mind-blowing effects if that's even necessary. The cost is another thing... I got the one I have for like 100 or so after rebate, and I was actually trying to check the specs on it, and I saw one selling in Ontario for 72 dollars on sale; depending on your job, that's a day or less worth of pay. Physics integrated into a video card is just not practical: either way, you're at a loss! There's a bottleneck from combination graphics/physics processing/data transfer, unless you were to use the GPU exclusively for physics, in which case it would be and always will be more cost-effective to reserve a separate unit specifically for it, especially if it uses a non-graphically-important (sorry) slot like a PCI slot. That way, you could also have your bangin' graphic set-up, but without any performance hits! The thing doesn't really have heat problems as far as I can tell, but I never did any thorough research on it; there was nothing I have ever heard about that anyway.
I couldn't tell you about on the highest of high-end systems.
Here are my system specs:
-EVGA LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 780i SLI (3-way, but I don't have 3 cards as I first thought the ppu would require a pci express slot, and it does not)
-Wolfdale 3.0ghz core 2 duo CPU
-dual EVGA GeForce 8800 GTS 512mb GPUs in SLI
-of course, a BFG Tech Ageia PhysX PPU
-Tagan A+ El Diablo Case (with that world record 360mm fan - I'm too paranoid to use cooling other than air)
-150gb 10000rpm hd, I use the onboard sound which isn't bad, and got a cd/dvd rom/ram combo

Like I said, it's not the best, but it suited my purposes and I got good deals on all of the parts!

Hi there sorry for the late reply but is just saw today the Graylord invitation on my youtube account.

About Ageia and the PPU i'm afraid it is obsolete just because they are discontinued.

Now for facts about the PPU :

Games only support the PPU if they use the PhysX SDK and if the developers enabled hardware physics for the game. So no PPU in Crysis or MoH airborn, even if the later use the PhysX SDK, the developers didn't added code to use the PPU.

Also to see the true power of the PPU you need to make a game using huge amount of physics effects (Warmonger). For example 1000 physics boxes will run the same or even better on the CPU, when it is doing nothing but physics, why? because 1000 physics boxes for a modern CPU is not taxing, and it will sometimes run better in the CPU because of this :

For the CPU : Physics object -> CPU -> GPU
For the PPU : Physics object -> PPU -> CPU -> GPU

So the time/path the physics info travels for a CPU simulation is small so if the CPU isn't having any trouble simulating the 1000 physics boxes them it will be faster.

But now you have a simulation that has 1000 boxes, 20 soft body's, water physics and cloth physics.

On this the CPU will go to is knees and the PPU will happily simulate it.

Also many peaple thought the PPU was nothing but a CPU on a PCB and that is wrong the PPU is very "similar" in design to the CELL (PS3) processor it is a multicore (how many cores is unknown but is thought it as 15 or more) processor designed specifically for Physics.

The PPU came to market in the time that Single Cores were the majority CPU's in use and it survived the test of time against dual cores and even quad cores. quad cores would be able to equal the PPU but only if Physics was the only thing it calculated in a game, what as you guys know is impossible. Warmonger is a good test bed for CPU's as it run without PPU.

The Cell Factor demo "scandal", yes you can run the demo (only 2 maps on the "Full" game) with out the PPU (using EnablePhysX= false on the demo icon) but every time the big Flag comes to view the fps's will fall to single digits and you have graphical problems, anyone that says the contrary is lying. Also the Cell factor demo only used 40% of the total PPU power.

The Full version was a disaster as it had a bug on the physics that made them very unstable, they also decided to use a huge amount of physics joints to make the game very heavy for CPU's and cuted on the number of ridged body's what made the game loose all the visual appeal that the demo and the trailer add.

Also the PPU drivers and also the PhysX SDK matured and started taping the true power of the PPU this was shown in GRAW2 Ageia Island, UT3 Ageias PhysX maps and the more impressive Warmonger.

People also like to use Crysis to talk against hardware physics acceleration but what they don't realize is that the majority of crysis physics are ridged body only yes they are impressive for a CPU only game and that's why they are very taxing, but they aren't better them what a PPU could do you can see my GRAW2/CRYSIS Tree physics comparation to see the differences on Youtube.

I will stop now the post is becoming huge

Any question or anything that you guys didn't understood just reply.

cheers

p.s - here is good links to know everything about the PPU and a list of games that use the PPU.

http://personal.inet.fi/atk/kjh2348fs/ageia_physx.html#mobile

http://rubux.net/content/view/7/6/

Okay, I'll bite then........ Small intro, as I registered through the YT posting that popped up through YT selections. I'm a lowlevel assembler hacker, eg: I hack BIOSes and am one of three alive on this planet that I know of to do so ( without sighning NDAs; eg reverse engineering ). If you're also one please report. There seems to be one every continent, so we should have 5 of 'em floating around somewhere. I've been in the industry for a number of decades, so the crap I'm about to throw at you reading this stuff might take a while for you to digest.

So here it comes in no particular order, shape, political correctness and in engrish as the other 5 languages I speak its not my native language.

Fact #1: Nvidia PhysX is SOFTWARE EMULATION, OMG yes, it's a SOFTWARE implementation, and that's why it's so darn taxing on the current NV cards both performance and wattage.
Fact #2: A 2008, 120W 9600GT can barely meet the speed of an 2.5 years old 40W Ageia card, and then oops, no time left to render something.....
Fact #3: The only hardware implementation of the novodex library is a device called the AGEIA Card on the PC(I/Ie) bus
Fact #4: NV PhysX SOFTWARE EMULATION also runs on a device that uses a technology called GPGPU using massively parallel processors. http://www.gpgpu.org/
Fact #5: Nvidia PhysX is a SOFTWARE EMULATION of the Novodex/PhysX API on the PC mainly geared towards NV cards
Fact #6: PhysX also/already runs ps3 & xbox360 and yes, the ps3 is better at it because of its native cell architecture.
Fact #7: Because of the dynamic nature of cache and thread coherency lost, found and GPU resources (additional) allocated during any SOFTWARE EMULATION of the PhysX ( formerly novodex ) this SOFTWARE EMULATION GENERALLY SUCKS because of previously named inefficienties; causing more people to buy NV cards.
Fact #8: the energy conscious and powerfull Ageia card was KILLED by NV in favor of their energy slurping, cache coherency losing, thread trashing GPUs; the death knell of AMD if they would have their way.
Fact #9: and hear this CPU fanbois: the current CPU implementation of PhysX under NV is a singlethreaded piece of EMULATION. Which means you can have a 16 core monster slurping half a powerplant per core, NV PhysX EMULATION will pick just one core, quite possibly max it out, but not thread out and say: "thank you, but no thanks, we want to sell more NV cards"
Fact #10: AMD blocks the development of PhysX on their cards http://www.tomsguide.com/us/AMD-PhysX-Havok,news-1950.html
Fact #11: NV PhysX implemantation is so darn taxing on existing NV cards that game implementations of PhysX so far never exceeded the threshold of an AGEIA card (128MB direct access scratch memory for rendering PhysX alone) Synthetic benchmarks might want to tell (sell?) you otherwise, but the cold hard facts at the bottom of this post tells otherwise.
Fact #12: The Ageia card looks more like a cell then an GPU
Fact #13: Non PhysX apps have no clue about Physx because Physx uses, you guessed it, Physx calls.
Don't believe me, a lot of the information can be found at the unofficial PhysX faq http://personal.inet.fi/atk/kjh2348fs/physx.html.

Below is my box, and yes a GF260c216 + Ageia card at the bottom with a GF7 in the middle; at the top a dualsocket AMD kicking in when needed.

This will probably be my first and last post on this forum as a tight schedule doesn't permit me to wander more off the pathway carved out the last 15 years on the net, but I just had to let all the fanbois feel it out there; go to school and learn computer technology and become the best there is.

You want hard, cold CPU/PPU/GPU numbers ? Here: http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/phy ... ce_update/