Originally posted by: aka1nas
Originally posted by: Jassi
Originally posted by: Smartazz
When unreal tournament 2007 comes out I may consider getting this if the diffrence is significant, but it would still be after I upgrade my video card. Don't Ageia physx cards slow down your frame rates anyway sometimes according to dailytech?
I'm gonna wait until ATI and NVidia implement this in their own line. It might take some time but it'll happen.
From all the marketting crap both of those companies are spewing, it doesn't sound like they are actually creating APIs to go along with GPU-physics support. They are just going to add support in the driver for select proprietary physics engines(I.E. Havok FX). Ageia's solution at least will work in software across multiple cores if the PPU is not present.
Here's the problem with what you said. It is simple Computer Science. Physics is just math. All this Aegia stuff is pure marketing nonsense. Whatever can drive specific floating point calculations the fastest, wins. This is why the GPU makers are getting in on this. It turns out a GPU does math pretty damn well. In fact a quad-core CPUs can have one core dedicated to doing physics math. Havok FX supports that too.
Havok FX is as proprietary as the Aegia SDK. It is just a physics engine. Havok FX happens to use a second GPU to do physics instead of the Aegia card.
The big advantage Aegia has is that's SDK is free, mostly.
Aegia needs to bring on the price of this card to $50 really friggin' soon. The Aegia PhysX chip just like any other micro-processor, while CPUs and GPU are getting faster, this chip simply, isn't. This chip will be old and slow in another year.