Ageia to debut PhysX "physics processing unit" for gamers

Yeah, you've got your quad SLI graphics cards and your pricey sound card to offload those processor intensive duties from the CPU, but what abouta physics processing unit? Ageia is hoping gamers will latch onto their new PhysX card that takes over physics related duties from the CPU, leaving it worry about AI and your taxes. Compared to modern GPUs the card sounds ancient, with 128MB of RAM, 130nm manufacturing, and a mere PCI interface, but it should be enough to deal with the current physics experiments being performed in recent games like F.E.A.R., Half Life 2, and the forthcoming Unreal Engine 3 which pledges support for the card. Ageia will work with other manufacturers to provide the actual boards, much like NVIDIA does, but there's no word on when the cards will start to show up in the market.

[Thanks, John]

UPDATE: It took merely a day of speculation to find out about shipping PhysX boards, which are going into Alienware PCs as we speak and should be ready to ship next week. Dell and Falcon Northwest have also been announced as launch partners.

[Revrant @ Mar 21st 2006 6:35PM]

It's a promising premise, and you can also check out the various physics demonstrations through their website, Sacred 2, sequel to the German-made(it was also what Diablo 2 was supposed to be, in some sense) RPG hit, which is interesting, physics in a hack'n'slash RPG? Shock.

I still don't know what the hell this thing would do in Unreal 3, or UT2007, it'd be nice to see it's beefy feature set actually being applied to a real forthcoming game.

[Old Number 7 @ Mar 21st 2006 6:47PM]

Physics calculations lend themselves to parallel processing just like what video cards do. I would like to see ATI or NVIDIA incorporate these things into future graphics cards for PCs. I believe the xbox 360 might do this already.

[Zombie Flanders @ Mar 21st 2006 6:50PM]

They will need that processor to process the physics of me drooling over that physics processor.

[Scott Ezell @ Mar 21st 2006 6:54PM]

Well, if you already have SLI, then you'll be using nVidia's SLI physics processing soon.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/06/03/20/1818236.shtml

[shteeve @ Mar 21st 2006 6:59PM]

I would like to see it with the new physics in TES:Oblivion

[BAMF @ Mar 21st 2006 7:05PM]

So when is it coming out???

[Michael @ Mar 21st 2006 7:15PM]

This story is old news. Seriously - it was posted in October '05.

If you're going to post a story - ensure it's updated and relevant.

Boo.

[ChronoZaga @ Mar 21st 2006 7:54PM]

Oh good lord! First they attached two video cards together and you happily plunk down twice as much money to get the uber-duper game-gasm. Now, a Physics Processing Unit? You people will buy anything.

[aka Bitter @ Mar 21st 2006 8:00PM]

Psst... Ageia, watch your back:

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30413

Why buy another card when my 7800GT can do the same thing?

[jason @ Mar 21st 2006 10:15PM]

Bitter, because it's not really physics processing. That's just for particle effects and the like. Ageia does collision decection (stuff that actually affects gameplay and is interactive); Nvidia will not. It's two separate types of data, so gpus can't do true physics processing.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=30434

[d3 @ Mar 21st 2006 11:29PM]

"Physics calculations lend themselves to parallel processing just like what video cards do. I would like to see ATI or NVIDIA incorporate these things into future graphics cards for PCs. I believe the xbox 360 might do this already."

There is no physics processing unit in an xbox 360.

[elpunko @ Mar 21st 2006 11:34PM]

ultimately this is going to lead to the most hardcore games needing barely a intel celeron to run their games. with a dedicated card for each aspect of the game.

[Jay @ Mar 22nd 2006 12:13AM]

I can see a future where there will be many different cpu's controlling a single game.

One for Textures and Polygons.
One for Physics.
One for Lighting.
One for Muscle simulation and Animation.

[sonude @ Mar 22nd 2006 2:00AM]

And one for your virtual girlfriend
Get a life, nerds.

[Scott @ Mar 22nd 2006 2:33AM]

jason, perhaps you should find a better source, try here:
http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=303&pgno=0

seems that it does more than just particles.

[Lisa G @ Mar 22nd 2006 4:35AM]

When is it coming out?

[Neil Jordan @ Mar 22nd 2006 5:47AM]

Sounds cool but I remember back in teh days when I bought a Voodoo 2 '3D processing card' as they were called back then, being a separate card to the main GPU. It hardly took any time at all before new GPU had this built in. If this card really buily on an old process like 130nm then it's clear that in no time at all it will be miniturused and put onto new GPU's or the motherboard. I'd save my PCI space for now.

[Andy @ Mar 22nd 2006 5:50AM]

There's no word on when we can actually run SLI physics on our own systems. But NVIDIA says that both games and drivers that support SLI physics will be available by the end of the year.

[OddManOut @ Mar 22nd 2006 7:18AM]

"First they attached two video cards together and you happily plunk down twice as much money to get the uber-duper game-gasm."

It's funny...reading these boards is already making me feel old. Though "Chronozaga" may not be one of them, it is amusing that some gamers/tech-heads are actually too young to remember that nVidia did SLI way back in the days of the Voodoo 2 (what was that, circa '95? '96? Help me out here...). It's not new or unprecedented. And yep, I remember those days "Jordan", you had have your 2D board AND your 3D board, AND then when DVD was becoming popular and the cheapest DVD player out there was a DVD drive you needed a PCI board for hardware decoding (if you didn't want everything grainy or choppy anyway). Heck, going WAY back you used to buy the systems math co-processor separately, so adding extra processing units is old news too...

But it is getting rather extensive. Let's see..Dual Quad core CPU's (8 cores)+ Dual-Dual Processor GPU boards (in SLI - 4 cores)+ PPU (Physics Processing Unit ? 1 core) ?

13 total processors

Jesus...crank up the A/C, put some Bawls in the fridge, and switch on the 3 phase, I'm gonna get my game on tonight...

Remind me again why the CELL processor will make the PS3 the end all be all of video gaming...

[marke @ Mar 22nd 2006 9:38AM]

hmmm.. now if I could use it, or something, designed to specifically crank out boinc credits, that would be great.. imagine a PC card desgined to crunch boinc projects, and nothing else, purposebbuilt it should be able to dramatically increase wu production...

[Arc @ Mar 22nd 2006 9:57AM]

"it is amusing that some gamers/tech-heads are actually too young to remember that nVidia did SLI way back in the days of the Voodoo 2"

You must be getting old, because the company, Voodoo, had not yet been bought by Nvidia when they released their SLI Voodoo2. I believe this is Nvidia's first attempt at SLI, and ATI's second with the crossfire. But I could be wrong, I'm getting old too.

[Mohammed Waseem @ Mar 22nd 2006 10:26AM]

Super Duper Game-gasm? burp. Well, I guess we started of from Atari? Or, was it the 6 bit hand help brick game? Or, was it the Chinese who invented the Abacus?

Guys! We're talking about tomorrow, not yesterday. What will a 128MB ram do, inform granma that she's got the highest score in Minesweeper? I guess we're looking on GBs here. As for Ageia, we need technology that tends outplay tomorrow, not relish on yestercentury's punched cards.

[play free games @ Mar 22nd 2006 10:52AM]

I would also like to see how this aids in rendering and in animation. Hopefully this technology will be successful and can be integrated into all future video cards. Like another poster said, top games could be run on a celeron.

[E @ Mar 22nd 2006 11:51AM]

These will also be usefull for 3D particle FX in software liek SoftImage XSI and Maya.

These calculations DO NOT lend themselves to paralel processing! I wish! It would have saved me days of my life sitting there, waiting for a particle sim to finish calculating. At least not in teh manner these things are claculated by the software that's out there- Real Flow especially.

[as6o @ Mar 22nd 2006 12:55PM]

"You must be getting old, because the company, Voodoo..."

Apparently you guys aren't old enough. The Voodoo series was developed by a company called 3dfx (who here remembers Glide?). 3dfx developed SLI for their Voodoo 2 cards which still required a normal graphics card via pass-through for day-to-day graphics/desktop stuff (i.e. you'd have 3 graphics cards in your system in a SLI setup.) When nVidia bought 3dfx one of the big IP was SLI (both the tech and the name.)

[Neebs @ Mar 22nd 2006 6:33PM]

People on IRC have actually said it was dumb when I suggested something like this and here it is! I couldn't think of REASONS for it to exist, though.

[fil @ Mar 25th 2006 3:02PM]

i'm just going to laugh when they re-combine the GPU, PPU and any other PU they can think of into one MEGA PU. Then, they'll say "tired of all those different cards in you PC? Try the new & improved MEGA PU!" and they'll mark it up 200%. consoles look better & better everyday.