GeForce 8 Cards to Gain PhysX Engine Support
During a financial call, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hseun Huang revealed that the ported engine will bring enhanced physics capabilities to all of the company's existing GeForce 8 cards, as it will be programmed in CUDA.
"Finally [developers are] able to get a physics engine accelerated into a very large population of gamers," explained Huang. "[It's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes...Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA."
At the time of the AGEIA purchase, Nvidia noted its intent to integrate PhysX support into its products, but did not specify any details. In light of today's revelation, Huang expects to see increased sales of the Nvidia cards, especially to those equipped with SLI slots.
"It might, and probably will, encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot," he said. "And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics."
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deadhorse
replyWhen is the 9-series coming? Will they have hardware-based PhysX?
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If it does it better not cost $250 more.
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The fact they are implementing them as a software solution for the current 8 series means ANY 8 series is a PPU. This means it is now in the mainstream rather than a niche product and any NVidia development partner could implement PhysX for free and have it work if you have a (second) NVidia card.
If they make the 9 series with an integrated PhysX chip that runs simultaneously with the GPU, it will be a win for NVidia in the next generation display of graphics AND realtime realistic physics simulations of water, cloth and destructible anything.-
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I don't see anywhere in my post advocating a one-GPU world, only merely a prediction of a winner. To think that Nvidia would sit on their asses instead of developing a counterchip or new way of processing would also be naive.
ATI is already implementing HAVOK into their Crossfire configurations:
http://ati.amd.com/technology/crossfire/physics/index.html
Their solution seems the same as NVidia's however, where you must have the same graphics card to run it either as a GPU or a PPU and not both.
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It doesn't matter what we 'want.' Nvidia is making all the right movies and ATI/AMD continues to shoot themselves in the foot and release products which performance worse with little cost benefit to the consumer for that reduced performance.
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From what I understand, the 9 series cards will have a GPU and a PPU so that the load can be balanced more easily. Also with that in mind the PPU will be utilizing PCI-E 2.0 therefore improving system performance as the old PhysX cards were PCI 2.2 which we all know has shit bandwitdth compared to PCI-E 1.0 and even shittier than PCI-E 2.0
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I saw it on a post somewhere, it was a few weeks ago.
To me it would make logical sense to keep it on a second processing unit to take load of the GPU and allow it to do what it was intended to do.
If I remembered that post link I would put it in. Sorry.
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