Physics card

[chicha]

what is the use of these cards?
can't the 8800's handle all these?

and does any one here have one?

[xbonez]

no, i don't think anyone will have a physx card. plus it isn't of much use because very few games have been developed in a way that they can take advantage of a physx card. so it means, even if u did have one, most games would run the same. i think GRAW and GRAW2 support physx cards

[rohan]

my best guess is that rather than using programmatical methods for simulating physical happenings, a physx card uses hard circuitry to do that.

For ex., assume a collision. So, to simulate that, i write a C++ program which runs on my processor [Central proccesor].. which basically includes all the calculations required for an elastic collision simulation. Now, there is gonna be a lot of operations for this on the processor level. A PPU on the other hand, may have a processor instruction for collisions, so all these calculations are done on hard circuitry and since it is specialised to do it, it obviously will not require as many operations as a CPU does. The problem with this is that the PPU cannot be used for most other operations.

Now, as i said, this is my best guess, which basically stems from my ignorance.

[Cool G5]

PPU is good.But before coming into reality it will take ages.
Then again there will be a race of upgrade in PPU.
Who has that much money to upgrade the whole rig every year??

[chicha]

are there any mobos which can take these cards as well as say 2 8800's?

[xbonez]

i'm not sure which interface these cards run on. if its the PCI interface, than any mobo can take them over and above two 8800s. if they run on PCIe, then 680i and the soon to come 780i both have 3 PCIe slots

[napster007]

HEY cheer up!! the new spider mobo has 4 pci-e's so it will take it,leaving a pci-e empty