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[IMG News]

Techgage.com has posted an Interview with AGEIA's Andy Keane. AGEIA is developing a Physics Processing Unit, or PPU, called PhysX. The interview covers technical specifications of the PPU card, the interface, several examples of PhysX in action, and more:

Techgage: Due to current limitations of even the highest end CPU's, they cannot handle the extreme physics in the demos you've showcased. With the introduction of Dual Core CPU's, is there now less of a need for PPU?

Andy Keane: No. In fact, there is a great benefit to pairing Dual Core CPUs with a PhysX processor. Even if you use the full bandwidth of the Dual Core processors, games can only display about 1,000 rigid bodies. The PhysX processor will handle up to 32,000.

PhysX is an exciting development for computer gaming, but particularly the Mac platform. Apsyr is one of AGEIA's featured partners and it has been announced that a Mac software development kit will be released. Both are great news for Mac Gamers. With AGEIA's Mac supportive stance, in contrast to Havok, the success of PhysX would likely lead to an increase in the number of games ported to the Macintosh platform. Head over to TechGage.com for the full interview.

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[mtrank]

I'm familiar with Physics Engines, but not with PPU's.  Does this card/chip replace a graphics card or is it installed in addition to it?

[clocknova]

More importantly: can this thing be used instead of Havok?  In other words, can the Havok engine be replaced with this in games that use Havok, thus facilitating Mac ports?

[Eric5h5]

mtrank, on July 28th 2005, 11:23 AM, said:

I'm familiar with Physics Engines, but not with PPU's.  Does this card/chip replace a graphics card or is it installed in addition to it?

You should read the article.  Anyway, it's in addition to a graphics card.  It accelerates physics in the same way a graphics card accelerates graphics.  But there may be graphics cards in the future that also have PPUs.

Quote

More importantly: can this thing be used instead of Havok? In other words, can the Havok engine be replaced with this in games that use Havok, thus facilitating Mac ports?

No.  Different physics engines do things in different ways.

--Eric

[davidhelgason]

Apart from the future perspective of the PPU board, Agiea's Physics Engine is a wonderful piece of software: fast and robust. And when the hardware arrives physics simulation will automatically offload off the CPU.

Ageia has a very aggressive market strategy to take over the whole physics engine market which is great because opposed to Havok they're actually cross platform, and don't only focus on AAA titles.

We licensed it for our Mac based game engine so it's available even to indie developers and other non-AAA groups (yeah yeah, shameless plug, I know).

d.

[Hobeaux]

long, long ago in a computing environment far away, all graphics were done in-software much like physics are calculated now. Back then, most graphics were fairly simple and it made sense to just write your own graphics rendering engine.

Then came 3DFX. They saw the future of video game graphics and developed a 'card' that was specialized to only calculate 2D and 3D graphics. People laughed! "why would anyone need such a thing?" they cried. Heck, even the original "Unreal" used software rendering—though they made it possible to use an external 3D card should someone want to fork out $300+ for one.

People saw what a 2D/3D video card could add to a game and they stopped laughing.

Now AGEIA is fixing to bring a new revolution to the market—people are skeptical. Some are laughing. But rather than licensing HAVOK (which only works on PCs) developers can make it so that people can use Physics cards to process all those calculations and free the computer up to worry about all the in-game interactions, AI, collision detections, and whatnot.

And the world will stop laughing again.

[bobbob]

Eric5h5, on July 28th 2005, 10:16 AM, said:

No.  Different physics engines do things in different ways.

You could make a drop-in replacement, but it would probably cost you more than Havok. You could rewrite the game to use something else, but again it would be expensive and probably error-prone for understaffed and overworked porting companies operating on the cheap. It could be done, mind you, and (maybe if you also sacrifice compatibility with the PC version) you could probably build one library for multiple games like Havok did, but the Mac market hasn't been robust enough to sustain that yet.