AGEIA Brings First Dedicated Physics Processor To Market
Posted by: Rob Loach at March 22, 2006 3:38:43 PM
MOUNTAIN VIEW and SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 22, 2006 – AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced the availability of its PhysX™ processor, the first physics processing unit (PPU) designed to power pervasive real-time physics in PC gaming. With immediate availability from the world’s leading gaming system and personal computer manufacturers Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest, the AGEIA PhysX Accelerator brings true physics interaction on a massive scale to serious gamers for the first time.
AGEIA PhysX Accelerator add-in boards from leading board manufacturers ASUS and BFG will be available in wide distribution in May of this year.
The AGEIA PhysX processor, with its massively parallel interactive PhysX engines, has been specifically designed to accelerate dynamic physical motion and interaction in games at a scale and quality far beyond what has previously been possible. Exciting new games optimized for the hardware-accelerated physics provided by the PhysX processor will feature complex characters, objects and environments that fully interact based on real-world, real-time properties.
With the PhysX accelerator installed in their PCs, gamers can now have different experiences every time they play a game. For example explosions will be in real-time and specific to the interaction of objects, not just replays of the same animation over and over again. Now game objects can smash, bounce, deform, shatter or explode and cause a different chain reaction every time, depending on physical laws such as force, speed, volume, pressure, or density.
"AGEIA is charting new territory by bringing dedicated physics hardware to market that delivers the real-time physics gameplay that gamers and developers alike have been clamoring for," said Manju Hegde, CEO at AGEIA. "With the PhysX accelerator board in these new PCs from Dell, Alienware and Falcon Northwest, gamers now have future-proof systems for a fast-growing library of great games that exploit their power."
More than one hundred games designed for and supporting the AGEIA PhysX processor are in development from over 60 leading software developers and publishers. Game developer and publishing partners include UbiSoft, Cryptic Studios, NCSoft, Epic Games and Sega, among many others.
"Dell continues to be committed to delivering breakthrough technologies for our gaming customers," said Joe Curley, director of Dimension and desktop XPS product marketing, Dell Product Group. "By offering AGEIA PhysX technology in Dell XPS desktops, including the limited-edition XPS 600 Renegade, our customers can play more immersive and realistic gaming content then ever before."
"Alienware systems have won numerous awards for outstanding gaming performance by incorporating components and technologies that are at the very forefront of innovation," said Frank Azor, Senior Vice President and General Manager for Alienware Worldwide Product Group. "By now equipping our gaming systems with AGEIA’s breakthrough PhysX technology, Alienware is delivering to customers an even higher level of gameplay that immerses them in the most realistic gaming environments possible."
"The realism that the AGEIA PhysX Accelerator adds to gaming is astounding," said Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest. "I think the PhysX processor has the potential to be as important an add-in to PC gamers as a Creative’s Sound Blaster® is today."
Completing the Gaming Power Triangle
The AGEIA PhysX processor completes the new Gaming Power Triangle consisting of the central processing unit (CPU), graphics processing unit (GPU) and PPU to balance the excessive computing demands of game logic, graphics and physics. Within this triangle the CPU "thinks and orchestrates" to drive game artificial intelligence and logic, the general purpose GPU "renders and displays" to deliver beautiful 3D imagery, and the third leg of the triangle, the new AGEIA PhysX Processor, "moves and interacts" to take gaming to the next level with pervasive dynamic motion and interaction.
Examples of other PhysX-driven features that will dramatically improve the gamer experience include:
Explosions with dust, debris and shrapnel that cause collateral damage
Characters with joints, convexes and other complex geometry that enable realistic motion
Spectacular new weapons with unpredictable effects
Lush foliage that bends and sways when brushed against by the player or other characters or objects
Dense smoke and fog that ooze naturally around moving objects
Fluids that ebb and flow, drip, or spray naturally with physical characteristics dependent on their viscosity
Cloth that drapes, flows, tears and billows depending on where it is placed and the environment
"The AGEIA PhysX processor completes the gaming power triangle, and will actually push the CPU and GPU to capacity as they will have to handle AI and logic and rendering and display for dramatically more objects that act and interact with entire environments in real-time," added Hegde. "With dedicated hardware-accelerated physics, we’re at the beginning of a whole new era of interactive entertainment possibilities."
About AGEIA
AGEIA™ Technologies, Inc., is the pioneer of hardware-accelerated physics for PC games and has developed the world’s first dedicated physics processor, the AGEIA PhysX processor. The AGEIA PhysX processor powers massive and pervasive real-time interactive worlds that for the first time obey the laws of classical physics. AGEIA provides a world-class cross platform software development kit to simplify advanced physics programming for the PhysX processor, as well next-generation gaming consoles. AGEIA is changing the face of gaming by working with more than sixty leading developers and publishers to deliver the next generation of physically immersive entertainment. The company, headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., is privately-held. For more information visit http://www.ageia.com.
"AGEIA Brings First Dedicated Physics Processor To Market" Discussion
d000hgMember since: 1/21/2002 From: Durham, County Durham
Posted - 3/22/2006 3:57:10 PM
Quote:
"AGEIA is charting new territory by bringing dedicated physics hardware to market that delivers the real-time physics gameplay that gamers and developers alike have been clamoring for," said Manju Hegde, CEO at AGEIA. "With the PhysX accelerator board in these new PCs from Dell, Alienware and Falcon Northwest, gamers now have future-proof systems for a fast-growing library of great games that exploit their power."
People are still using this term? Will they never learn?!
DrEvilMember since: 7/13/2003 From: Los Angeles, CA
Posted - 3/22/2006 4:23:16 PM
Anyone seen one of these in a system yet on any of the mentioned manufacturers pages? I'm curious what the cost for the board is, or rather, how much they are trying to charge extra for it.
Edit: nevermind. It's +$275 on alienware rigs. LOL
Edit: nevermind. It's +$275 on alienware rigs. LOL
Hah, sad thing is Im actually using ageia's sdk because I heard these boards would be released. But +275? hah I didnt even pay that much for my graphics board... and Id rather have 2 graphic boards then a ppu....
Well, with Havok FX around the corner, things don't seem to be looking too good for AGEIA. Two general purpose SM3 video cards kinda sound better than a $275 proprietary card which only can handle physics... especially since the geometry data is probably already on the video card anyway. Time will tell I guess.
Don't get caught up in the Havok hype. Their press release is nice and misleading.
Havok FX = some special additional physics on top of the regular CPU physics
So it doesn't run the full physics system on the GPU, but just some nicer explosion debris etc
The PhysX "can" do more than just physics (I use the word can lightly as it depends on your design and how well you code your system)
At the moment I have Physics, AI, Speedtree Calculations and Terrain Calculations all running on the cards. Freeing up the processor and graphics card to really get into the guts of the game.
Its all a matter of design and how you want to calculate things. Heck once you know the SDK and once you know what the card is good for you can split the calculations between the card and processor.
DrEvilMember since: 7/13/2003 From: Los Angeles, CA
Posted - 3/23/2006 6:15:00 AM
Can you give some more info about how u develop for it? I'm curious as to how you give it data to calculate, and how you get the data back. Seems as though there would be significant bus bandwidth usage from ppu->cpu->gpu
Anyone know if standalone cards are still going to be $250-$300 ? Alienware/Dell/etc have been known forever to artificially bloat the cost of components, so I'm curious what they are going to cost when bought independantly.
I think that adding a card to run only physics computation is a very bad move,
i don't think many people will spend 200$-300$ , just to add some fancy debris explosions or to run some lcp solver , the physics calls are going to be computed in software if the hardware is missing anyway, and with the increasing speed of general cpu , someone might think twice before buying this particular add-on.
I think that ageia should joint venture with nvida or ati to provide an on board chip with their graphics card , that will accellerate both .
This reminds me the very first time when the accellerator cards had to be added upon the vga card , they disappeared very quickly , matrox mystique , anyone ?
I'll enjoy the added realism in games, and then I'll alter my engine to support it.
After that I'll have my "simulation of the species" NN+GA project running with it. Will be cool to see a speed-up in the physical calculations and see how species evolve their bodies.
Unless this becomes the defacto standard for all PC's (like integrated graphics is the defacto standard, therefore all games can be coded with expected support for even a basic form of hardware rendering) or was scallable with systems not possesing the coprocessor, it's not going to catch on. Physics can't be toned down just like graphics in some situations unless it's just eye candy - but simulating explosive fractures and thousands of pieces of obstructive debris in a scene can't be easily just "turned down" for lower system speculations the same way that decals or pixel shader effects can, as physics often alters gameplay. I don't imagine that it would be easy to write separate codepaths for systems with and without physics chips AND design gameplay accordingly - unless this SDK has some special features I'm not aware of. Right now, the Havok solution, even though it only supports more "eye candy" effects, seems much better, as it runs on existing hardware and doesn't provide gameplay altering changes.
Tesseract_HotplateMember since: 6/6/2005 From: Atlanta, GA
Posted - 3/23/2006 9:25:37 PM
That's pipe dreaming. You really think Joe Consumer will blow $300 for a card that no developer will assume he will have, so he might see some small added content ... possibly ... if the dev team had time to add it?
It's nonsense. Worse than that, it's counter-productive. A bunch of tech junkies are getting excited over an unnecessarily proprietary bit of hardware that serves no purpose except to fragment a burgeoning technology, and stuff AGEIA's pockets.
Original post by remigius
Two general purpose SM3 video cards kinda sound better than a $275 proprietary card which only can handle physics... especially since the geometry data is probably already on the video card anyway. Time will tell I guess.
You've obiously never used a physics engine then. No physics engine uses the same geometry data used for rendering!
You have one set of data for the physical representation, and a completly different set of data for the graphical representation!
I dont think this buying card will add extra features to a game, well no more than buying a new graphics card add features.. If you dont have an PhysX card in a game which uses Ageias physics system, it will just run on the CPU instead of the PhysX card. So really this card will just give you an FPS boost in games which use it.
Well really, like buying a new gfx card, some features might be disabled unless u have one, like detailed smoke etc... But game critical physics will just be shifted to the CPU without one.
It's the first time such a card will be available for the consumer market. So it might be a lot of money now (first time) but maybe it will drop over the years - how much did the first 3d cards cost?
In addition to that if you can offload other things than physics to it too, it might get interesting especially if the Gfx card is already totally busy with the rendering and drawing. See the AI Implant news.
Moreover it will be interesting for non-game industry like simluation etc. Of course this market won't probally pay their bills - but it's a market too.
I am happy that they bringing this tech to a broad audience especially with the support from many products like Unreal3 engine etc, it has a good chance to not disappear very soon.
My company is supporting the new PPUs through PhysX integration. I was worried when I first saw the HavocFX announcement, too. However, after looking into it and seeing the examples in NVidia's latest GPU Gems book, even shader model 3.0 compatible cards do not have the architecture to properly handle true rigid body and deformable object based physics. The same kinds of calculations that can be done well with random access memory can only be done with iterative fake "rendering" passes on a GPU. My guess is that NVidia will have just as hard of a time selling consumers a second high end video card as Aegia will have selling consumers a PPU. It's really somewhat of a toss-up. The raw performance statistics of 2GPU vs 1GPU + 1 PPU systems will probably decide in the short term. In the long term, PPUs are unavoidable, because a GPU that starts becoming too generalized to handle things that aren't graphics won't compete against a pure graphics GPU. ATI will force NVidia to stay focused. :-P
Original post by Dom77
It's the first time such a card will be available for the consumer market.
Physics cards were round back in the early 90's but they got dropped when graphics cards started to come out. I'm glad someone picked the idea up again, I thiink it'll be a great leap ahead for pretty much everything game related. If you distribute all the physics calculations off the graphics card, you should have so much more power to implment even better visuals. I'm certainly gonna buy one.
SnOrfusMember since: 2/28/2006 From: North Bay, Ontario
Posted - 3/25/2006 9:07:54 AM
Quote:
Original post by PhoenixV
Quote:
Original post by Dom77
It's the first time such a card will be available for the consumer market.
Physics cards were round back in the early 90's but they got dropped when graphics cards started to come out. I'm glad someone picked the idea up again, I thiink it'll be a great leap ahead for pretty much everything game related. If you distribute all the physics calculations off the graphics card, you should have so much more power to implment even better visuals. I'm certainly gonna buy one.
That's not necessarily true. If I recall, what you're talking about were the math co-processor add-in boards (8087, 80287, etc.) that were eventually phased out when that functionality was fully integrated within the processor (486's). These were not boards that were designed for physics calculations, but instead just floating point calculations. The difference is actually quite large.
Original post by bobNinjaPenguin
The PhysX "can" do more than just physics (I use the word can lightly as it depends on your design and how well you code your system)
At the moment I have Physics, AI, Speedtree Calculations and Terrain Calculations all running on the cards. Freeing up the processor and graphics card to really get into the guts of the game.
Its all a matter of design and how you want to calculate things. Heck once you know the SDK and once you know what the card is good for you can split the calculations between the card and processor.
Im pretty happy with what it allows us to do.
A couple of years ago this was an excellent idea. Now I havea whole extra core that can do all that _and_ a whole lot more.
Conner McCloudMember since: 1/28/2001 From: Golden, CO
Posted - 3/27/2006 3:54:33 PM
Quote:
Original post by Anonymous Poster
A couple of years ago this was an excellent idea. Now I havea whole extra core that can do all that _and_ a whole lot more.
2CPU+GPU > CPU+GPU+PPU, by far.
Not really. For one thing, you're ignoring the fact that 2CPU+GPU+PPU > 2CPU+GPU. Also, a separate processor has benefits over a second core...most notably in memory access. And finally, a dual core processor is not the same as having 2 CPUs.
I don't know for sure that this thing is really going to go anywhere, but I suspect it might. And either way, arbitrarily dismissing it in favor of additional cores isn't wise.
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d000hg
Member since: 1/21/2002 From: Durham, County Durham
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