Joke of the day: AGEIA Hints at Multi-PPU Plans

[drvarunmehta]

Source

XbitLabs reports AGEIA may have dual-PPU plans for its PhysX hardware physics accelerator card. The latest drivers reveal a revised hardware scene manager that allows multiple PhysX cards to operate in tandem to deliver greater physics acceleration capabilities. According to the article, “Theoretically, Ageia’s future drivers should be able to ‘split’ the scene into multiple three-dimensional ‘compartments’ assigning a dedicated physics processing unit (PPU) for each.”

While first generation AGEIA PhysX endowed titles have plenty of particle effects, graphics cards are having trouble keeping up with the plethora of particle effects. Although AGEIA is pushing its PhysX as part of an ultimate gaming experience, AGEIA is also partnered with various workstation application developers including Autodesk, SoftImage and various 3ds Max plug-in developers. The uses of multi-PPU in games is intriguing, however the technology appears better suited for 3D modeling applications.

Havok, a competitor to AGEIA, recently announced it partnered with Autodesk to deliver real-time physics to 3ds Max 9.




If hardware manufacturers had their way, soon we would need 11 processing cores to play a game:

Quad core CPU (4 cores)
Quad SLI (4 cores)
Dual PPU (2 cores)
Soundcard (1 core)

Who would buy even one PPU much less two given the cost and negligible impact it has on gameplay?
What next, dual soundcards?

[Akhil Jain]

lol! good point. what i can say.
may 1 day come when we wud have a 8 core processor simply just to control RAM and a 12 core to control storage .
another multicore wud be taking care of input and another for output.
invest ($**,**,***) for playing a latest game and calll urself a gamer .
and after a month chuck that system into just garbage as ur raddiwala will be offering u only rs. 10 for that machine which is based on technology of past and even companies have stop making parts of it ..
ur friends will say 8 & 12 cores only !!! u r living in backward era ..
digit will suggest us to buy a new system with 25 cores and be upto date..

[shaunak]

Sound card dosnt have a processing core.
I feel 2 cores on the processor and one on the gfx card is fair enough to play the most mordern games.

[drvarunmehta]

Originally Posted by shaunak

Sound card dosnt have a processing core.
I feel 2 cores on the processor and one on the gfx card is fair enough to play the most mordern games.

The sound card does have a processing core. How else does it decrease the CPU's workload while playing games etc? In fact the X-Fi series of soundcards are supposedly faster than a 1.4 GHz processor in terms of raw processing capability.

[paul_007]

i think all the hardware manufacturers have gone mad ......there shud b some gap b4 launching a new product... i think they have started targeting only rich customers