Ageia's mobile PhysX PPU headed for Dell's laptop line

John Carmack may not believe in dedicated PPUs, but it seems that Dell certainly does, as IGN recently reported that the company is set to add Ageia's new mobile PhysX PPU to its laptop line, a move that now appears to be all but confirmed by the above image residing on Ageia's press site. The mobile PhysX PPU itself was announced just ahead of the recent Leipzig Games Convention, and promises to offer many of the same benefits as its desktop counterpart while keeping power consumption to a minimum (10W during gameplay, according to Ageia). While there still doesn't seem to be any official word from Dell, as IGN points out, the company's top-end XPS M1710 (or forthcoming M1730) would seem to be the most likely to get the new upgrade.

[Thanks, Mack S]

[Jeremy K. @ Aug 29th 2007 3:26PM]

Great! Another opportunity to waste money.

[Burke Hamblin @ Aug 29th 2007 3:35PM]

Great to see we're edging back to the 2" thick laptop!

[Kurian @ Aug 29th 2007 3:51PM]

i agree with carmack.

[Ondra Soukup @ Aug 29th 2007 4:02PM]

why ?! :DD

[nerdtalker @ Aug 29th 2007 4:29PM]

Still waiting for the XPS M1730 to launch, so much for August 27th being the magic day, Engadget...

Hope you weren't that far off, because I canceled my XPS M1710 because of it.

[dj-kenpo @ Aug 29th 2007 4:32PM]

hopefully dell will also include dedicated fax machine processors as well. I find my core2 can't quite handle the load given by a 14.4 modem.

[sr1329 @ Aug 29th 2007 4:51PM]

10w? My entire Thinkpad X60s uses less than 7w to give it a nice 9 hour battery life. Yes the whole machine, Wi-Fi and all.

[Juaquin @ Aug 29th 2007 5:05PM]

What a waste of what precious little space there is inside a laptop...a second videocard would be more worthy of the room, and probably cost just as much.

[wrabbit @ Aug 29th 2007 5:07PM]

I don't understand why are people so against a dedicated physics processor?

It allows the CPU to spend more cycles on stuff like AI and game logic, which means better gameplay. And don't nobody give me that old line of "the CPU is powerful enough to handle physics on its own".
Currently there are no games that come even close to utilizing physics the same way they utilize graphics - not even Crysis is going to do that (but even on that game, you will see very noticeable performance boost if you have a dedicated PPU).

Right now, physics in most games are at about Quake level (and I'm talking the first one), including Half-Life 2 - it's impressive when experienced for the first time, and it's certainly not bad but it's nowhere near realistic.

And don't even get me started on AI - take the best AI in a game you can find and you still end up with something that becomes predictable awfully fast and half the time does something stupid or "not human"-like.

So I say bring it on - anything that helps improve physics and/or AI is good in my book.

[sr1329 @ Aug 29th 2007 5:36PM]

Alright you convinced me. I need an AI co-processor.

[argy @ Aug 30th 2007 2:04AM]

it's not so much that a dedicated physics processor is wrong... it's that the ageia ppu doesn't have the kind of support that the technology needs. just about every objective review of the technology says it's a good idea and that agiea is onto something, but there aren't the games to support it.

the fact is that crysis WONT use ageia's technology.. and just about every other 'next generation' pc game won't either.

Maybe having this ppu as a component in the laptop will help rectify the issue and give ageia and its developers the install base they need to start building games for the technology but it's a chicken and egg situation for them. Most game developers are falling on the side of using lesser software physics like havok.. and no one seems to mind. the best games (bioshock - to name a recent example) are using competing technology that doesn't require ageia and no one is complaining.

[Juaquin @ Aug 29th 2007 8:31PM]

So you would have us get a separate processor for every little aspect of a game? We already have graphics and sound, and you also think we should have physics and AI? So 4 extra processors besides the main one? When you get down to it, processing physics isn't all that intensive - the only problem is the way developers implement it in games.

Besides, the new ATI/Nvidia cards have multi-purpose pipelines that are quite adept at processing physics if the developer builds it into the game, thereby making a PhysX card quite useless. If Ageia was smart they would just sell their software to Nvidia/ATI. Gamers (myself included) are not cool with having to buy yet another piece of hardware.

If you really want to see physics and AI progress, talk to the developers, not the hardware producers.

[gilo @ Aug 30th 2007 1:36AM]

What PPU can do a CPU can do , and as CPUs are getting faster they will do so cheaper and be usefull at other tasks as well .

I still don't see how exact physics are going to help gameplay as opposed to "faked" and "tweaked" .

This is just another way *some* hardware firms and developers are trying to get more money out of gamers , I hope they flop .

[Jack @ Aug 30th 2007 7:19AM]

totally agree, why have extra bits of crap when a multi-core processor would do the job fine?

[wrabbit @ Sep 1st 2007 3:57PM]

You're right, strictly speaking, sticking another core onto a CPU isn't different from adding a PPU, except for one thing. PPU can be optimized for physics calculations and thus perform better for less (money, power, heat, take your pick), whereas a CPU must be all-purpose. If it's not all purpose and let's say one core is optimized for physics then you're doing the same thing as a PPU but instead of having a third party do it, it's done by Intel or AMD.

@gilo: "I still don't see how exact physics are going to help gameplay as opposed to "faked" and "tweaked""

Actually if anything, physics are much more important to gameplay than graphics, since gameplay involves interaction with the game-world. You can have the most detailed human avatars in the game but if they move like stiffs and when they die they just fall over like a brick you're not going to enjoy it. As far as "faked" or "tweaked" physics - everything in computer games is faked or tweaked to an extent, graphics including - in a proper game that gorgeous temple behind you isn't really there when you're not looking. However, the more power you have the less obvious faking you need to do and the more detail you can put in all the stuff you can't fake.

@Juaquin: I wouldn't call physics "little aspect" and yes 4 additional processors - Graphics, AI, Physics and Sound. Oh and btw, if I were to drop one it'd be sound. The fact is that today's most built-in sound chips would satisfy most people unless they're audiophiles, have expensive speaker setups, or very picky about their game audio. Many PC building guides already recommend sticking with onboard sound for all but the high-end systems.

"processing physics isn't all that intensive" - actually it's as intensive as graphics because, newsflash, light/image calculations are physical in nature, it's just a specific kind of physics.

Argy brings the best point, it's a "chicken and egg situation" - unfortunately developers are not taking advantage of this yet because there is no market but there's not going to be a market without developers' support. However, negative attitudes sure aren't going to help it.

"the best games (bioshock - to name a recent example) are using competing technology that doesn't require ageia and no one is complaining."

The people aren't complaining because they don't know what they're missing. One of the most touted graphical features of BioShock (btw, I got it and I gotta say, it was a bit overhyped, but I digress) is the water, and I saw it, it's damn good. But you know what, it's not anywhere close to realistic water, not by a mile. You know what would make it better? Fluid physics.

That's something that I think Ageia should use, not cloth. If you think about it, there is no game out there with anything even remotely resembling something that behaves like a real fluid (I can only think of one, and it's just a drop of water basically as the game's main character), yet water appears a lot in many games. Most folks will tell you that they are perfectly satisfied with water in games the way it is, but that's because they've never seen what it would be like to have water (or any fluids for that matter) behave realistically in games. If we ever get to a point where some developer will attempt to implement real fluid physics into a game, that's when people will realize what they've been missing and maybe the market for PPU will be born.

[Graham @ Oct 10th 2007 10:50AM]

As someone with an audiophile setup (arguably the best headphones - Sennheiser HD650) in the world running through a NAD separates setup, I can say that I don't give a rat's arse about sound processing. In fact, the reverb and echo in EAX sounds very odd and distorted. Integrated sound chips are just fine. The difference in quality is not really noticable, even through reference class cans, and without EAX sounds loads better. So audio processing and expensive sound cards I don;t really rate. However, I have a huge issue with this notion that we should have a low-grade physics engine running on our graphics cards (havok/nvidia/ati). Having a nV 8800 GTS, I don't appreciate being expected to shell out well over twice the price of an Ageia card for a second graphics card that will run a physics system that doesn't really do much, and not get any SLI graphics benefits. My current card is plenty fast enough on its own, and if I could afford an SLI setup I would want the graphics benefits. The physics that Ageia provides can make a huge impact on the graphics of a game, making everything potentially look a lot more realistic. OK, so maybe a lot of stuff renders the same, but you can't interact with most of your environment. A proper physics environment would revolutionise games. I would be quite prepared to shell out to get games that demonstrated proper physics. I have just been playing the demo of Colin McRaes Dirt, and when the physics engine kicks in, such as in a crash, the framerate drops from 50 FPS to about 10 or less. It has a massive impact on the way the game looks and plays, and this is on a dual core processor. That said, the physics are superb, and add an enormous amount to the game. If there were these physics and the game didn't stop when something happened I would have bought the game, but this actually put me off. I have been wanting to get a decent driving game with excellent graphics, and this seems to be the only one on PC, but yet if it judders along when the physics kick in then that's no good. An ageia card solves this problem. To those who say 'just run physics on the CPU' I say try taking the CPU out and see what happens. You will find that the CPU is actually very busy during a game, and running massive physics computations on it is going to conflict with everything else, making everything get high latency and bogging everything down, even if the CPU could run the same simulation (look at the benefits of a GPU, a CPU can't compete with dedicated processing). The havok solution is not a solution, it is just middleware. It's a way for developers to not bother with writing a physics engine. Ageia also has this. And now the ageia middleware is free (this has just been announced). So it may be in developers interests to use that system instead. I think it is a shame that the ageia hasn't taken off yet, and I am hopeful that the new lisencing will help it take off, since this is the only way we are going to get proper physics in the game. To those who don't want real physics in their games, I say go back to space invaders if you will. You won't know what you're missing. The real losers here are us game players and the software houses, who are missing out on the next big thing to sell their games to us.