[OT] Physics Processor?

[EAGLE_01]

Permission to come aboard?

I was wandering around, dreaming about my next PC, and saw this add.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...9&sku=B52-7834

Please post your thoughts/evaluations...

Does this thing really make a diffierence?
Calm Seas.

[StandingCow]

There is sort of a debate going on about this.. nvidia and ati say that a 2nd card (SLI or crossfire) can do just as good a job as a physics card.

And on top of that, I am not aware of any games that can take advantage of one.

That said, I think graphics are getting close to the point where they are good enough, and physics will be the next big focus.

[Rilex]

Only on games that take advantage of it. There are very few which do.

I'd wait until nVidia/AMD start to release GPUs that provide general purpose physics if you are looking for something new.

[EAGLE_01]

Thanks for the replies.

So, essentially, none of our simulations, (SH3/4, LOMAC/Black Shark, FSX,the next Oleg Maddox IL2/BoB) are currently written to use a PPU at this time? It's somewhere down the road?:hmm:

Wow.. it has a Lifetime Warranty...

[XanderF]

While the physics card is really quite useless, the company also makes video cards, which ARE very important. And video cards from BFG, eVGA, and XFX have lifetime warranties.

XFX calls theirs 'double lifetime' - lifetime for you, and if you sell the card, the second hand buyer gets a lifetime warranty, too. eVGA and BFG also tend to 'upgrade' you if you have a much older part that dies (IE., if the card you have is out of production and they cannot replace it with the same model, they replace it with a similar model of the current gen).

[EAGLE_01]

I'm looking forward to my next video card. And, although I love AMD processors, I have always steered clear of ATI cards, and this last one I bought because it was all I could afford that was AGP, etc...is THE LAST ATI card I will ever buy.
NVIDIA is hands-down the best.

[Typhaon]

The power of this Ageia PhysX card is impressive... but like the others said... it's limited to very few games... as the name says it's only for physics in games and it can handle a lot of objects at a time... and most impressive the ability to calculate fluids in real time... but at the moment it is not worth, because there are too few games to play with it...
But if you want to take a look you can watch some videos at their homepage:
http://www.ageia.com/physx/videos.html

[SingeDebile]

it still remains to be seen if this will become the new standard,

i think the biggest thing working against that is the dual, quad, and soon to come 8x processor cores

games will start simply dedicating one processor for physics, one for AI etc..... ( cant remember where i read a great article talking about this)

couple this with the fact there is a very limited support for the card... and because of this the games can only be designed with the card offering a bonus in the visual and not interactive area (so that the game is still playable without it), I would save my money for something else