The PHYSICS chip...

[seTclock]

wondering what you guys think of the PS3's use of the physics chip by Ageia?

from what i've been reading, this thing is supposed to revolutionize graphics by taking all the game physics load off of the processor just like the original 3D video cards did back in the "processor rendered graphics" days

will the 360 be able to compute hundreds of blades of grass moving individually in a scene?

I'm a huge Msoft fanboy, but the exclusion of this new technology concerns me.. should I be concerned?

[Rubiks14]

have you not seen the kameo demo with all the grass? better yet the whole thing. it is very cool and you really should watch it if you havn't already http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/490/490038/vids_1.html it is the first vid

and no i really don't think you should be worried at all

[Grindstone]

Hmm, sounds like we should get smerf01, Citizen X or one of our other "well informed" members on this Ageia question.

[Rubiks14]

yea i would say so because i really don't know :D i'm just making a guess

[Jeet]

i thought the PS3 was gonna use the Havok Engine

[seTclock]

... isnt Havok the software engine and Ageia the PPU? (physics processing unit)

muck like a half-life 2 engine running on an ATI GPU?

[Lt_JWS]

they could just use one of the three cores for physics :top:

[Rubiks14]

yea i think they will use 1 core for physics, 1 for ai and the other for all else

[seTclock]

doesnt matter, a "core" isnt a physics chip... else Msoft wouldnt need ATI as they could have used a core to process all the graphics

what I'm saying is.. PS3 will use a physics *accelarator*, even though they could have done the same thing and let the cell processor use one of its cells for it, they decided to use a dedicated PPU

I've read that both Nvidia and ATI are trying to aquire Ageia and could pay somewhere around $2 Billion for the company, they have to be very impressed with the power of a PPU to be thinking of offering that much, and I'm just wondering why the decision Not to put one in the Xbox360 if Sony is diong it? does sony know something msoft doesnt?

i hope one of the techies on the forums could clear this up... : (

[Cybergig1]

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3143371

this is one of the physics engines it'll be using supposedly, which it mentions the 360 can't fully utilize. Although this is just one of a few engines I suppose

[pApA SmerF01]

there's a huge difference between the RSX and the XENOS.

Procedural Synthesis. This is by far the most revolutionary piece of information for consoles. If you want to be impressed, read up on that, because it will stun you. Imagine thousands of individual characters on-screen and with individual A.I. Procedural Synthesis has made that possible.

If you would like to know more about this subject, look back in this forum, there's a thread started (by yours truly) that details the subject.

[Lt_JWS]

doesnt matter, a "core" isnt a physics chip...(
That's true, If you've played Half Life 2 you can quickly realize that you dont need one, sure it would take a load off the CPU but with three cores @ 3.2 i dont think it will have any problem :top:

[seTclock]

thanks for the link Cybergig1, a very interesting development,

pApA SmerF01, ditto,

but this is what i imagine/fear:
I understand that the draw of being able to render hundreds of enemies with their own AI in a forest of non-repeating original trees, and I'm convinced it will greatly add to the realism and suspension of disbelief when playing,
but picture this:
I buy the new Splinter Cell for the 360 and am loving it till my friend invites me over and pops it in his PS3 and shows me that when Sam Fischer emerges from a lake, there are hundreds of water dropplets beading and sliding down his wet suit, and as he stands a puddle starts forming under him and then he gets shot in the arm and the blood dripping down his elbow looks so realistic and the dropplets are falling and mixing in the water puddle and i didnt see ANY of this on my 360 cause Msoft decided to use software and not hardware rendered physics!...

I've been following the news about the 360's hardware and am convinced it either trumps or rivals the PS3 in all other areas, but I dont want any of my PS freinds to be able to show me a PS3 displaying something the 360 cant do : (

I hope I'm wrong but I see more and more info about the coming "PPU" revolution.
Techreport.com has a new atricle posted today about BFG soon releasing a 128MB PCI PhysiX cards for PC's

sony made a Huge mistake with their PS3's bandwith, but did Msoft make almost as big a mistake not soldering a PPU onto their board?

is PhysiX the next "Voodoo" that future games will be optimized for as they were for the voodoo in the 90's?

[starlock]

From what I can tell from a web search - Sony have only licenced the AGEIA PhysX SDK. This does not mean that the PS3 will have a phys chip, there is no such chip quoted in any of the released PS3 specs.

The original story quoting the sony use of a chip appears to have been one which jumped to an incorrect conclusion.

See http://ps3.ign.com/articles/635/635492p1.html for the original press release and

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Jul/bch20050726031524.htm for the resultant apparent mistake.
:)

[seTclock]

thanks for the clarification starlock,

and yes, it was the ign article that made me think the PS3 was using the chip,

hey, maybe I'm wrong and the systems are so damned powerful they dont Need a hardware physics accelerator, but to play devils advocate once more, what if the chip Does make a huge difference and a year or two after the 360's release we get PC envy as all the latest PC games are coded for the chip and look fantastic compared to our -physics in software- crippled systems? :confused:

[Aquanox]

This information about the Xbox 360 has already been withdrew by AGEIA itself.

Executives at physics-chip Ageia backed off recent claims that the upcoming Xbox 360 console would be unable to perform advanced physics processing.

At the European Game Developers' Conference in London last week, Ageia executives claimed that Microsoft's game console lacked the horsepower to run a fluidic physics simulation, which would model water flow or other liquids.
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Wednesday evening, Ageia vice president of marketing Andy Keane acknowledged that including those comparisons in its presentation was a mistake, and that they were based on speculation from public specifications released on Microsoft. Although the company has tested its software on Xbox 360 development kits, Keane said, the tests were of extremely limited scope, and weren't designed to test the limitations of the hardware.

"The summary of the information below is that AGEIA would like to go on record that we do not have data to support performance comparisons for the PS3 or Xbox360 that would impact any of our physics features," Keane said in an email, which was also sent to other news organizations. "Specifically, statements that the Xbox360 cannot run fluid simulations are not correct. In addition, conclusions about relative performance should not have been stated or implied in our presentations."

In an interview, Keane acknowledged that the original claims regarding the Xbox 360, as reported by ExtremeTech, were a part of the presentation. However, the Ageia employees that presented at the European GDC did not develop the presentation, and did not provide the information in its proper context, Keane said. The slide has since been removed, he added.

"We really have no clue," Keane said in an interview, regarding the capabilities of the Xbox 360 and its ability to process the Ageia physics SDK, known as Novodex.

However, the company has tested Novodex on single-core and dual-core PC processors, as well as the Ageia chip, so those comparisons remain valid, Keane said. The benchmarks run on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 simply tested to see if the SDK would run, and do not provide performance data, unlike the performance tests run on the PC systems.

In videos shown in the presentation, the physics computations of the boulder demonstration were running in software in the first case, typically between 4-6 frames per second on high-end PC processors, consuming almost all of the CPU cycles, Keane said. The second demo, performed using the PhysX processor, consumed about 20 percent of one processor and generated between 40 and 50 frames per second.

Keane, who was a former vice president of marketing at graphics-chip pioneer 3Dfx, said evaluating physics processing would prompt its own set of debates, in much the same way a graphics chip's performance is heavily scrutinized. "That's why we think that benchmarking physics is going to be as big a war as [benchmarking] a GPU," Keane said.
And by the way, take everything you read from 1up.com with a grain of salt, they're as biased as it gets.

Source: ExtremeTech (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1856641,00.asp)

[cablekiller]

Even if the PS3's physics chip is "all that", it is a separate chip that has to communicate to everything else through a bottlenecked bus.