Nvidia to bring PHYSX to 8 series GPU

[Ragenrok]

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51321 (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51321)

It seems nvidia is goign to be releasing a software patch that will allow nvidia 8 series cards to act as a PPU. I thought this would be something to share seeing as how WAR is said to support some sort of PHYSX tech.

[Obby]

Hm... Interesting.

*twirls with goatee*

This pleases me.

Not really sure why it would matter in WAR, but FPS games should be huge with this. Of course, my card already gets hotter than it should as it is...

[Valinox Ruina]

I was reading about that. Any 8xxx series card will have the CUDA patch that allows it to run PhysX code. But I really think that anyone withOUT SLI will be sadly disappointed with how much performance is lost trying to do this. They mentioned that any SLI or 3-way computers will take one of the cards and turn it into a PPU. I really dont know if thats good because the PhysX cards themselves only cost ~$120 and an 8800GT like I have in SLI costs ~$220. So its in essence turning my $220 GPU into a $120 PPU. IF and only IF this works really well and doesnt FULLY take over a card and uses just some of it for PPU calculations, will I ever use it.

[8igdave]

yeah ive been reading up about that. Im not so sure im happy about it though.

Currently agiea is useless. They dont have any games which are really supported by them which are worth while. The only two were GRAW2 and UT3. UT3 serposid "phyics card only" maps were unplayerble with AGEIA's phyiscs cards (PPU's) and and the GRAW2 game really didn't see much of an increase in effects for the £100 quid they cost at the time.

I beleive intel has got their hands on or is thinking about buying the havok engine which is superior and id imagine them to intergreat physics enginse running on the separate cores of the cpu instead. I think is by far a better idea.

If they intergreat the PPU into the graphics card it means that its likely to get hotter and nened even louder cooling, use out even moer wattage and that would increase heat even further. This would mean taht the clock speeds may need reducign and it may limit their overclockerbility.

Also what happens if you awnt to go SLI and you end up with 2x PPUs. Does taht give you sli physics as well? lol.

[Ragenrok]

what im hoping is you cna have 2 nvidia 8 series in there WITHOUT running in SLI and still being able to use one as the PPU. I'd buy a 8400 for the PPU and extra monitor support if its possible.

[8igdave]

I gues with nvida's huge bank role and probably some of the best acuteture designers around they should make a very good ppu. Well they certainly did a better job then ati with the 2900xt and then the 3870 which is just a shrunk 2900xt with no real performance difference. Also Nvida seem to sponsor alot of games. Well alot of them say played bset on nvida or what ever it is. So hopefully alot of A+++ games comig out with good PPU support.

And for the love of god would someone please tell me how to spell acuteture lol.

[Ragenrok]

architecture?

[Ravenwing]

Currently agiea is useless. They dont have any games which are really supported by them which are worth while.

Agiea is now owned by Nvidia - which is why this patch is happening. Basicly the idea is that the PPU chip gets integrated in future cards rather then having a seperate card.

[8igdave]

architecture?

Thanks :) Must remeber! lol

Agiea is now owned by Nvidia - which is why this patch is happening. Basicly the idea is that the PPU chip gets integrated in future cards rather then having a seperate card.

Um... yes im aware of this. But currently agiea are useless because no body usees their hardware and it is not powerful enough to support it anyway. Its out dated tech which should ahve been dropped. hopefully nvida will make something usefull out of it. But i think intel will do better with havok if they can get something working on separate cpu cores.

[Gundrik Rikbolgisson]

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51321 (http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51321)

It seems nvidia is goign to be releasing a software patch that will allow nvidia 8 series cards to act as a PPU. I thought this would be something to share seeing as how WAR is said to support some sort of PHYSX tech.

best news. evar.


Um... yes im aware of this. But currently agiea are useless because no body usees their hardware and it is not powerful enough to support it anyway. Its out dated tech which should ahve been dropped. hopefully nvida will make something usefull out of it. But i think intel will do better with havok if they can get something working on separate cpu cores.

"nobody" uses their hardware? "not powerful enough"? "dated tech"? "should have been dropped"? plenty of powerful statements without a shred of evidence. i have a few friends who love their PPUs on unreal.

it's a business plan that needed to be picked up by a big name brand. i'm sure it'll becoming something great in the near future that puts nvidia gpus over ati.

[8igdave]

Bet they gona be expensive as well. Think when they come out ill wait 6/7months to see what gamse are supporting them and also if any more powerful ones come out. be pritty peed off to buy the first batch to find out by the time the games coming out support them a new and improved one will be out.

[Gundrik Rikbolgisson]

Bet they gona be expensive as well. Think when they come out ill wait 6/7months to see what gamse are supporting them and also if any more powerful ones come out. be pritty peed off to buy the first batch to find out by the time the games coming out support them a new and improved one will be out.

What do you mean? All they're going to do is require a driver update in order for hte 8x series gpu to support the physix engine. they will no longer require seperate hardware for PPU support (according to the article)

[Ravenwing]

You're going to wait 6/7 months to see if more powerful ones will come out? That's just a stupid thing to say, of course more powerful/better ones will come out. That's the nature of the game.

If you complain about this with PPU's, then complain about CPU's, GPU's, RAM, HD's and the list goes on and on....if you wait 6 months everytime something new comes out you're never going to buy a new computer part.

If you hate seeing better stuff come out a few months after you bought your stuff, buy a console.

[8igdave]

best news. evar.



"nobody" uses their hardware? "not powerful enough"? "dated tech"? "should have been dropped"? plenty of powerful statements without a shred of evidence. i have a few friends who love their PPUs on unreal.

it's a business plan that needed to be picked up by a big name brand. i'm sure it'll becoming something great in the near future that puts nvidia gpus over ati.

My orginal source for it simply not being powerful enough have now relised that they had a fault with their hardware. So it looks as if you can scratch that statement

quote]Update - 21st Dec 2007
We've since spoken to Ageia, who have informed us that there may be a problem with our hardware configuration which results in the low FPS we encountered. You can read our thoughts about it here (http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1609501&postcount=40), or Ageia's response here (http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=1619704&postcount=57). We are currently investigating the matter further.

Update - 18th Jan 2008
We have recently discovered that faulty hardware may have caused unreliable performance in the PhysX review of Unreal Tournament 3. As such, we later revisited the game with working hardware, the results of which you can read here (http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01/18/bit-tech_revists_ut3_physx/1)[/quote].

However you cannot denny that few people use it and very few games support it. GRAW 1 and 2 supported it but were a waste of time with hardly anything new being added.

The PPU's are still old however and havn't been updated in quite a while.

[8igdave]

You people reply to fast for me to keep up!

What do you mean? All they're going to do is require a driver update in order for hte 8x series gpu to support the physix engine. they will no longer require seperate hardware for PPU support (according to the article)

I missed that. Was under the impression they will be intergrating something new into the GPU. THats good news.

You're going to wait 6/7 months to see if more powerful ones will come out? That's just a stupid thing to say, of course more powerful/better ones will come out. That's the nature of the game.

If you complain about this with PPU's, then complain about CPU's, GPU's, RAM, HD's and the list goes on and on....if you wait 6 months everytime something new comes out you're never going to buy a new computer part.

If you hate seeing better stuff come out a few months after you bought your stuff, buy a console.

No what would be really stupid is if you wernt out and bought one to find out that thegames which will support it wont arrive for another 6/7 months because they are in making and then you find out something new comes out then. What i said is perfectly logical and i cannot see how it would be more logical to buy a ppu card and then wait 6/7months for the game. (note i was under the impression we would be buying a new PPU/graphics card, which is obiously not the case now, however i still stand by my statement of that not being illogical in the view of the ppu card being another buy, which it was at the time of writing..)

:EDIT:

yeah just read it through again and all it is a download. Just missed that out. Wow they really are on to a winner here :p

However they make it sound as if you have to choose between PPU or GPU at the bottem saying people could have two PPU's and 1 GPU etc. MM surely not?

[Gundrik Rikbolgisson]

Yeah i noticed the comment about dedicating a GPU to function as a PPU. I'm not sure how that's going to work. Is it optional to do so? Guess that's more of a reason to get buyers to consider SLi. Haha... gotta love the business world.

[8igdave]

Yeah i noticed the comment about dedicating a GPU to function as a PPU. I'm not sure how that's going to work. Is it optional to do so? Guess that's more of a reason to get buyers to consider SLi. Haha... gotta love the business world.

Wouldn't put it past them to try and push SLI off this. I was going to go SLI when i bought my pc but the cost to performance gain wasn't worth it and the 680i's were a no go.

I need to read up about those new 700 seires boards actually. The 680i was plagued with faults with raid, memory interfaces burning out etc. They have such a high fatality rate they should be called the Fatality boards. MM and the creative sound cards should call them the unsupported boards. Or crappy driver boards or creative dont care about us boards. MMM not quite as catchy i gues. Took them ages to sort out their 64bit problems and then ther was the you cant have 4gb installed in your pc problem. I bought mine just after all the problems were sorted though luckerly :)

[Aqe]

Nvidia will probably release loads of cards with Physx engine on them. They got a huge advantage over all others with it currently.

[Nerror]

Interesting. Considering the price of 8400s, this could be good *if* WAR actually benefits from the physx engine. If so, all I'll have to do is to find a cheap, passive cooling solution to it, since I am building for silence as well.

I wonder how hot the card would run if it's only doing PhysX stuff. Anyone have any ideas?

[8igdave]

I remeber reading siomwhere that now they can use GPU's to do thinsg like hacking and they can do in hours what would take mounths on a cpu as they are so powerful. So i wonder how powerful a gpu you will need to make an effective PPU.

As from what it sounds like is you either choose ppu or GPU. Therefore do you get a 8800GT or a 8600GT etc. Perhaps tjhe 9600 coming out will be the right choice.

[Nerror]

I was thinking more along the lines of a 8400GS used as a PPU and a 8800GT for graphics. However, I don't want a 780i (or other nVidia) mobo, I want a Intel X48 based one. So it'll have to work in a non-SLI configuration.

If it does, I might just get a Gainward Bliss 8400GS (http://www.gainward.com/product/product_detail.php?products_id=142), since it's passively cooled.

[8igdave]

I was thinking more along the lines of a 8400GS used as a PPU and a 8800GT for graphics. However, I don't want a 780i (or other nVidia) mobo, I want a Intel X48 based one. So it'll have to work in a non-SLI configuration.

If it does, I might just get a Gainward Bliss 8400GS (http://www.gainward.com/product/product_detail.php?products_id=142), since it's passively cooled.

They would be foolish to make them only work on sli boards. I thinks it will work in any board with two PCI-E x16, although the P35s only run at x4 they dont really show much loss of performance. Ive got the X38 Quad GT so i should be sorted. Although i wont get another card unless there are some good A+++ titles coming out making use of a PPU.

Intrestig they menchen SLI PPU. What games would ever need that over SLI gpu?

Id probably get a minimum of a 8600GT as they are cheap anyway. But also would want to see who wins the war Intel vs nvida in the physics section. i will imagine 1 of them will be the better solution and get all the games. Although nvida could win this as GPU's are alot moer powerful then CPUs.

[Theomega]

This is terrific news. I figured it'd become a reality when I read about Nvidia's Quantum Effects technology that's equipped on their 8 series cards. (Not sure if it's only the high end cards that have it.)

[Aes]

Obviously I'd imagine that the 8xxx series cards are not going to be very good PPU's seeing as the chip architecture is not designed for dedicated physics processing, but the 9xxx series and beyond will probably be better at it. It seems to me that this is a good budget option, instead of SLi, you can buy a new graphics card and use your old card as a physics card, and you can still run dual displays, using the weaker card for basic stuff like video or browsing, whilst you use the stronger one for a more intensive task.

There are probably two reasons for this. One, most people don'ty even know what a physics card is, this is a good way of introducing people to PPU's. Two, of the people who even know about PPU's they probably consider them a luxury, if you upgrade your graphics card and use the old as a PPU and you see a drastic increase in performance, you might be inclined to buy a dedicated PPU, or upgrade your graphics card more often.

[8igdave]

Obviously I'd imagine that the 8xxx series cards are not going to be very good PPU's seeing as the chip architecture is not designed for dedicated physics processing, but the 9xxx series and beyond will probably be better at it. It seems to me that this is a good budget option, instead of SLi, you can buy a new graphics card and use your old card as a physics card, and you can still run dual displays, using the weaker card for basic stuff like video or browsing, whilst you use the stronger one for a more intensive task.

There are probably two reasons for this. One, most people don'ty even know what a physics card is, this is a good way of introducing people to PPU's. Two, of the people who even know about PPU's they probably consider them a luxury, if you upgrade your graphics card and use the old as a PPU and you see a drastic increase in performance, you might be inclined to buy a dedicated PPU, or upgrade your graphics card more often.

Imnot sure there will be much arcutecture changes needed. The 8800s have already been used to hack very hard codes cutting the times down astranomicly. Of corse these were tests but probly used by some MI5 or CIA etc thing anyway!. If they can make it so that the physics are coded in such a way that the 8800s can make use of just like they have been doing with hacking. I would imagine they will be very powerful. Far more then any PPu we have ever seen before. But then there is the fact of, what do they do with the power?

have you see Agieas demos? Their effects are all blocky like a wall gets shot and blocks come off it. the textures are appaling and really nasty. Even with a very powerful PPU the graphics hit of having so many more polygons on screen would kill all the latest GPU's. So currently it seems like even with the extra PPu power it wont be able to be used very well or the effects of it will look terrrible. Unless they develop intergrated PPu and GPU with a GPU designed just to make the graphics for the physics bits. Like when an explosion goes off that graphics card kicks in makign all the extra textures over all the polygons to look very details.

But mmm that would be very difficult to code id imagine

[Aes]

Imnot sure there will be much arcutecture changes needed. The 8800s have already been used to hack very hard codes cutting the times down astranomicly. Of corse these were tests but probly used by some MI5 or CIA etc thing anyway!. If they can make it so that the physics are coded in such a way that the 8800s can make use of just like they have been doing with hacking. I would imagine they will be very powerful. Far more then any PPu we have ever seen before. But then there is the fact of, what do they do with the power?

Well, the physics cards will probably be have different amounts of memory and processing power that are in proportion to the work being done, the ratios might not be the same as for a graphics card. Also the PPU probably won't have any video outputs or anything like that so it'll probably be cheaper than a graphics card with similar specs. Also there'll likely be a specialized processor at the heart of it.

have you see Agieas demos? Their effects are all blocky like a wall gets shot and blocks come off it. the textures are appaling and really nasty. Even with a very powerful PPU the graphics hit of having so many more polygons on screen would kill all the latest GPU's. So currently it seems like even with the extra PPu power it wont be able to be used very well or the effects of it will look terrrible. Unless they develop intergrated PPu and GPU with a GPU designed just to make the graphics for the physics bits. Like when an explosion goes off that graphics card kicks in makign all the extra textures over all the polygons to look very details.

But mmm that would be very difficult to code id imagine

Physics from a computer's point of view is simply an aspect of animation and thus an aspect of graphics processing. Current graphics cards are basically integrated GPU and PPU. The idea is that physics processing is becoming as big a task as graphics rendering, so it's worthwhile to give it it's own dedicated processor so that it can be done more effectively. So the step up is using a a PPU in tandem with a GPU or GPU's. Allowing the 8 and 9 series cards to act as PPU's is a compromise towards this step, because they won't be as effective as a dedicated PPU. I would imagine the Agiea demos had blocky polygons because they were showing off the physics calculations being done, and not rendering power as the PPU doesn't do any rendering.

[8igdave]

Well, the physics cards will probably be have different amounts of memory and processing power that are in proportion to the work being done, the ratios might not be the same as for a graphics card. Also the PPU probably won't have any video outputs or anything like that so it'll probably be cheaper than a graphics card with similar specs. Also there'll likely be a specialized processor at the heart of it.


Good point never had thought about that. I would imagine it would need higher clock speeds and less memory as its not dealing with big textures. I wonder if they could get it to do other tasks like applying AA and AF as well seens as these are genearly memory restricted and the cards shouldn't theoreticaly be using as much memory as the other one.


Physics from a computer's point of view is simply an aspect of animation and thus an aspect of graphics processing. Current graphics cards are basically integrated GPU and PPU. The idea is that physics processing is becoming as big a task as graphics rendering, so it's worthwhile to give it it's own dedicated processor so that it can be done more effectively. So the step up is using a a PPU in tandem with a GPU or GPU's. Allowing the 8 and 9 series cards to act as PPU's is a compromise towards this step, because they won't be as effective as a dedicated PPU. I would imagine the Agiea demos had blocky polygons because they were showing off the physics calculations being done, and not rendering power as the PPU doesn't do any rendering.That makes sence also. Sounds to be some quite exciting news. WOnder how long it will take them to get it working fully as i doubt the first attempt will be that efficent.

Seesn as its all drivers goingn on that article. Do you recon it will not require specific game support. MM that would be a big break through.

[Aes]

I have no clue whatsoever.

[8igdave]

If this comes out soon then perhaps people should make sure any new mobos they get come with a spare X16 slot.

MMm that means the DSR might be the bset board to go for now.

[Gundrik Rikbolgisson]

If this comes out soon then perhaps people should make sure any new mobos they get come with a spare X16 slot.

MMm that means the DSR might be the bset board to go for now.

Actually.. eVGA ftw, but im just sayin'...

[8igdave]

Actually.. eVGA ftw, but im just sayin'...

Im presuming your talking about nvida motherboards?

Evga are the best with RMA'S and customer services. But the 680i boards you are talking about are all idental because they are all made on nvida's referance design. And as a result they are all pants with terribel raid problems etc. They really are very badly made.