ATI announces CrossFire physics platform

Today ATI says Ageia's PhysX engine be damned, as they're about to spit some new competition in the burgeoning hardware physics engine market. When you take that newish Radeon X1900 XTX physics adapter and combine it all Voltron-like with twin SLI graphics adapters -- and then throw in Havok Physics API support, which they announced today at Computex -- you get what they're calling CrossFire, a 2+1 graphics configuration bent on pushing more pixels and polygons than any of us sad little Engadget editors would ever know what to do with. Being that few motherboards would support this triple PCI-E configuration (and the fact that ATI is pimping Intel's forthcoming Core 2 Duo processor platform, which is expected to be announced in the very near future), it seems like you might not yet have to worry about whether the 10,000 in-game object boost this rig will provide is actually worth handing over your hard-earned bucks for.

[Mack Swift @ Jun 7th 2006 12:55PM]

Ah, finally, the comments have returned.

I went and read the various new articles pertaining to both ATI's Crossfire Physics solution and the Two Way-Dual Core CPU and Quad-GPU chipset solution.

While everyone argues the merits, pros, and cons of all this physics and oodles of core goodness, my question is this (no one asked this) -

Where in the world are we gonna get the power to get juice to all this stuff??!!

Given are current energy, oil, and fuel price issues; I'm suprised that no one thought enough to ask this question.

Power supplies are 850W and growing; we're almost to a KiloWatt of juice to power a desktop computer to play a video game or a movie to squeeze out the most possible frames or resolution! Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't this getting a little stupid??

[Matthew Boyd @ Sep 27th 2006 5:47PM]

Well, for comparison...

5000 watts - Electric oven
5000 watts - Clothes dryer (electric)
3800 watts - Water heater (electric)
3500 watts - Central Air Conditioner (2.5 tons)
1500 watts - Microwave oven
1500 watts - Toaster (four-slot)
900 watts - Coffee maker
800 watts - Range burner
500-1440 watts - Window unit air conditioner

In the U.S., heating and AC consume far, far more energy overall than electrical appliances. In fact, the aveage home uses 44% of its energy just on space conditioning.

I guess what I'm saying is, if you want to play Half Life on your enormous rig for four hours, turn off your central AC for one hour.

Or, since one horsepower is 746 watts, plug your computer into a horse!

[rutsy5 @ Jun 7th 2006 9:14PM]

While I do agree, it is more than wasteful, you might better spend your efforts against things like SUV's and such... given the small number of people actaully going to buy these compared to millions more driving Hummers and super-chilling their houses, i think these are a minor factor. However thanks for helping to spread awareness and concern abouot these things... we really need more people like you