AGEIA Q&A
Gaming Nexus is the site with the latest AGEIA Q&A. Vice president of marketing Michael Steele talks about the PhysX launch, lackluster reaction so far, ATI and NVidia's GPU physics acceleration plans and the time it will take before the physics market reaches critical mass.
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Dynotaku
replyI played Cell Factor a bit at Quakecon, and unfornately, the best thing you could say about it was that the framerates were... inconsistent. Quite frankly, it's a terrible tool to promote the Physx cards, and it wasn't even running with networking. They had 4 stations set up, and instead of playing against other players, everyone competed against bots, because the networking can't handle 400 boxes and pipes being thrown around on screen. And the bots ranged from braindead to consistently-headshot-you-from-across-the-map.
Until a game is built from the ground up requiring Ageia support, meaning gameplay effecting, destructible environments, $300 is a very unrealistic asking price for this thing.-
This card is ahead of its time. Like you said networking isnt up to par on handling this sort of thing and neither are gpus at this point. It isnt going to be until any gpu can give you an average of 60 fps so that a 30fps dip isnt noticeable that developers will really be able to do anything significant with these cards. Looking at what it does in Ghost Recon and weighing it against the negative impact in performance was enough to make me write it off cause a 12fps loss during an explosion that now has 13 largerish sized chunks of shrapnel isntead of the 8 in vanilla mode, all for $300 dollars, is just not worth it.
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This has been debunked many times, the dip in performance has absolutely nothing to do with the GPU and everything to do with the physics card. The Ageia card is behind it's time because it can't inform the GPU of what to draw fast enough.
I'm not a fan of the physics card idea in the first place but I have to say their first gen card is just not good and their demos (like cell factor) are even worse. This is somewhat to be expected and understandable of course as it's a new product.-
If I remember correctly, isn't there a console command to shut off the hardware support in that demo? From what I've read, turning off hardware support has no effect on the framerate at all.
Take it with a grain of salt, but just because it doesn't postively effect framerate, it doesn't negatively either. I also doubt that the card isn't "fast" enough to inform the GPU what to draw when, could you link me to an article or something?
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http://www.firingsquad.com/news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=10096
There was plenty other coverage too if you search on google
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This reminds me of the dark ages when Diamond released the NV1 powered Diamond Edge 3D boards. They were over priced and hardly supported by anything.
I dont think that someone will be able to mod a released game to take advantage of off-board physics acceleration in a way that it's a day and night difference the way iD did with GLQuake. GLQuake and Tombraider made the 300 bucks i dropped on my Voodoo1 worth every penny i just dont see how they're gonna pull that off with physics hardware.
They really need/needed to be integrated into a console system so that support for the hardware from all users was guaranteed.
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Maybe they can solve their network problems by requiring that network accelerator card. :D
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