With competition for those spare PCI slots already hot between dedicated sound,
physics, and even
network cards -- all promising to offload some CPU cycles to speed frame rates and enhance performance -- you've gotta hand it to AIseek for pushing out their new Intia "AI processor" in such a climate. The way it's looking from here, we just need more PCI slots, since the AIseek promises all sorts of Artificial Intelligence leetness that just needs to be had. They're saying that they can accelerate low-level AI tasks 200x compared to a lone CPU, giving NPCs better terrain analysis, line-of-sight sense, path finding and the like. AIseek also guarantees NPCs will be able to find the optimal path in any game that uses the chip, pathfinding abilities we've gone without for too long. Basically: more baddies, less stupidity. Unfortunately, the "chip" doesn't quite seem to exist in anything close to a retail form -- AIseek mainly seems to be after VC money right now -- and of course there's always the chicken and the egg problem being experienced by
PhysX of no games until people buy the card, and nobody will buy the card without games. All the same, we're hoping for good things from this technology, and would recommend you peep the read link for some simulations of the AI in action.
[Via
Ars Technica]
posted Sep 6th 2006 11:05AM
Physx would be prudent to look into this and perhaps offer a card with both physics and AI processors. Even better someone should just come up with a daughterboard platform with a standardized socket that would accept whatever auxillary processing unit (APU?). It'd be nice to see 3 of these daughterboards each loaded with it's own task specific processor, but all sharing the same upgradable platform.
I think this is a legitimate add-on card, the PhysX should be ON the video card. I could see this being in the processor, but not the video card, AI isnt a video thing. And since not everyone uses advanced AI processing, it wouldnt make sense to make it into the motherboards for an added cost. Maybe specific Gaming motherboards, but I already have a hard enough time finding a good MOBO with AMD and ATI alone, so the added criterion of trying to find one of those with an AI processor would suck. Maybe AMD assimilating ATI will change that, one can only hope.
I've been expecting this. Next will be a dedicated collision detection card. Imagine the immersion possible if you throw a punch at an enemy and their clothing deforms around your fist and such, rather than simply sinking into them until it hits some invisible bounding box.
The real problem with this is that AI is crap in games because the programmers don't invest the time to code good AI. This won't magically make enemies smarter - unless the programmers write the AI in the first place, and make it take advantage of this card, this is just an extra heater. Also, with multi-core being increasingly common, a special "second CPU on a card" is pretty pointless.
My comments on AI accelerators here:
http://www.ai-blog.net/archives/000153.html
I suspect that this techno-division-of-labor is going to end up royaly screwing the end consumer (end-gamer?).
Ken, it might be nice to have these task-specific processors on an upgradable platform but that also means that once any of these task-specific processors becomes outdated, it won't be upgrading as usual. It used to be fairly easy to just buy a new video card and CPU but now I'll have to buy a new video card, CPU, physics processor, AI processor... etc.
How 'bout a processor that just generates crates randomly throughout FPS titles?
What's left for the CPU to do once you've offshored the AI? Referee between the AI, the NIC, the PhysX board and the GPU? Kind of a menial task for a dual core P4, don't you think?
Ken, I'm pretty sure you're talking about the PCI or PCI-E slot. They're a standard slot that allows for individually upgradable cards.