Quote:Original post by BradDaBug
I'm looking forward to hardware accelerated occlusion culling. Think of the possibilities...
We'll get that in D3D10 anyway (via predicated rendering).
AGEIA PhysX Questions
We'll get that in D3D10 anyway (via predicated rendering).
Quote:Original post by PromitWhat's keeping companies from getting together and creating something like "OpenPL", or Microsoft adding a physics library component to DirectX in the future? If more companies start coming out with physics-on-a-die, standardization efforts are bound to take place, if not commercially than via open-source projects.
What worries me about this whole PPU thing is the lack of any apparent open standard. As far as I can tell, in order to use the PPU, a game has to use Novodex. Novodex is, of course, only free for non commercial use, which means you have to license it for a regular commercial (or even indie) game. Can you imagine having to license OpenGL or Direct3D?
Additionally, it doesn't seem like there's any room for competition. ATI can't decide to make its own physics chip, and make it interoperate with Novodex. No competition means a single price point, and dubious innovation.
Beyond that, GPUs don't exactly have an open standard either. A GeForce chip isn't compatable with a Radeon chip, now is it? Think of Novodex as the driver for the PhysX PPU. Other companies that get into this will publish their own "drivers" and eventually someone will have the smart idea to put a layer in between. (In fact, someone already is, in a way.)
Quote:Original post by BradDaBugQuote:Original post by samuraicrow
To address the open standard debate. If you want an open standard try ODE instead of Novodex. If recompiled to take advantage of general purpose code running on GPUs it will work well. The only catch is that you'd have to link to a .DLL file under Windows or a .so file under Linux so that your code can take advantage of the GPU-centric code or fallback to software calculation if a fast enough GPU isn't present.
Wiggidy wha? You're saying ODE can be compiled to use a GPU to do physics calculations? Never heard that before. Got a link or anything about that?
The best link I have is GPGPU which tells about all of the types of programs that can be accelerated by a GPU. Note that this isn't all applied to ODE yet but it is open-source so I have little doubt that it will take place when GPUs start to have that functionality. To find out how current GPUs are being used for Physics acceleration try Google which is where I found out about Havoc FX a commercial product that will be competing with ODE and Aegia.
Quote:Original post by Rattrap
I believe the PS3 is going to be having an integrated PhysX chip.
where did you here that ? AFAIK the PS3 has enough power in the cell processors to perform physics calculations as fast as a PhysX PPU anyway.
I heard (probably not a reliable source) the Nintendo Revolution might have a PPU though :)
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