AGEIA Q&A
New on GameCloud this morning is this AGEIA Q&A, asking company CEO Manju Hegde for an update on his company's PhysX chip and SDK. As for the launch date for the first set of add-on boards: "We are in the process of evaluating PhysX processor optimized games and are assessing our launch plans at this time".
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Derringer
replyPlease don't catch on...I don't really want to abandon PC gaming, but I will if I have to buy yet another stupid card to play the latest games.
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They will hopefully be merged into 'gaming cards' or something like that. I doubt that anyone really likes the idea of buying yet another expensive addon card.
It would be cool to have accelerated physics. In the last 10 years graphics have been the main point of development, it's time to catch up with the rest.-
Yeah, but really, the physics good enough. I mean, do you really want to see those crates tumble realistically when they could have put more effort into the design and testing process? I mean, sure, it'll look pretty cool the first few times you see whatever physics sequences there are, but in the end, it's all eye-candy.
But I agree, it'll probably end up being one do-all card at some point. -
I disagree physics is eye candy. It *can* be eye candy but it can also totally change gameplay. Physics does't have to be "falling crates". Take a flight sim or driving sim for example. There are plenty of physics calculations that need to be calculated each and every second. They can either be done cheaply (and thus poorly, leading to a more arcade feeling) or realistically and more 'sim' like.
I don't play many sims but this is just an example. Physics has so many applications in FPS's too aside from eye candy. How about properly modeling destructability of buildings? What if the everything was actually composed of building materials (think a house) and you could apply forces ripping it apart and have it react based on the forces that bind it together. No need for cheap hacks, if the wall is bolted to the foundation, the amount of force it takes to rip it off the foundation can be calculalated and you get a "weakest link" type situation where maybe the bolt will break or maybe the wooden wall will shatter.
I'm personally tired of running and gunning in static environments or almost worse ones with special destructable walls but others not. -
ATI have already talked about using the shader pipelines on the x1x00 cards to accelerate physics.
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Id buy one if they were somehting like $50 and quite future proof..... other wise fuck it... the consoles dont need one and neither dose my computer
I mean really... what good is one of those fansy new dual core cpu's if u offload all the work the cpu actually has too do onto specialized cards
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