Originally posted by: MrControversial
Originally posted by: Duvie
Originally posted by: VirtualLarry
No way. Sounds like this is a very-high-throughput FPU, intended for physics-sim processing, which is mostly matrix-math and some other ops. (Similar to the things that the Cell processor is supposed to be good for as well, perhaps that is what prompted the release of this device now.) There was another chip, low-powered, insane FLOPs, was actually optical-based, I believe, announced last year. Not sure if that's the same company, don't think that it is. The problem with one of these is, although it could be used as a powerful hardware-accelerator alternative to software - the game engine itself, and the game's playability, are dependent somewhat on the physics engine. It's not quite as scalable as the mostly-output-only graphics sides of things, the physics engine is part of the core engine of the game. So what about those players that don't own one of these accelerators? My guess is that the devs would effectively have to re-code two different versions of the game engines, one designed to have this card "plug in", and one that used a normal software physics-engine codepath. Then again, they mention that it supports the same API as their software physics lib does, so perhaps it really is a drop-in replacement.Originally posted by: MrControversial
DOA. This is stupid. With multicore CPU's on the horizon, this thing is useless.
Just another stupid comment by him...a lot of talk and no brain power proceeding it....
You come across as a presumptuous know-it-all prick. How about dropping the ad hominem and attack my arguments instead. I'm waiting to hear your counter arguments...or something about how my mama is a fat b*tch. You lost the argument way before it began.
Can I interest you in tweezer for the beetle up your arse?
We have hardware sound, hardware graphics, hardware RAID, hardware LAN, hardware modems.
Why would you go for physics done on a non-specialised chip (part of a multi-core CPU), when it can have its own add-in board to do the specified tasks?