My PPU is faster than yours!

[Northwood]

After spending £400 on a CPU and £400 on a Graphics card, we now have this thing called a "PPU" (Physics Processing Unit) to spend money on.

I think its getting a bit daft with all the money we have to shell out on hardware, the last thing we need is more cards to buy.

Looks like we'll have:

Graphics Card
Ray-Tracing Card (Will be coming to the home PC eventually)
Physics Card

Its all a big chunk of change to be throwing into a big square box (or little square box for those BareBones ppl here)

I can picture it now... "I got 34,618 in PhysMark06!" or "I got my Physics core to 800Mhz with stock cooling!"

So whats everyones take on this card for processing all the physics in your games? the upside is games will look alot more realistic, but do you really want another piece of hardware to worry about? Personally i'd rather see improvements to "AI" instead of things like physics, games look superb at the moment (HL2 for example) i'd be satisfied with HL2 quality for a couple years, while they work on improving "AI"

[eshbach]

with physics being taken off the CPU, they can spend more cycles on AI, which means this will make everything better.

[pik-ard v1.1]

hm, i thought all this stuff was somehow migrating from cpu -> gpu. or is a new card entirely being made?

[shadowing]

From what I can see, it'll turn out to be the following units:

Graphics
Central (It can be eventually booted by a better one)
Physics

These three combined can become very speedy in games especially. It would allow programmers to focus on other deeds. :)

[Rippthrough]

hm, i thought all this stuff was somehow migrating from cpu -> gpu. or is a new card entirely being made?
Have a look in the Computer related disc. forum.

[STEvil]

Sweeeet. ;)

[grimREEFER]

for the record, i coined the term physics card
:)

[mcnbns]

I think it might help, but not enough to make me spend another $200. I'll just overclock my CPU and "suffer" with whatever I get with that an my GPU.

Sounds like another SLI thing: they can't make the cards that much faster, so they make everyone buy a second card instead.

[POLAR_br]

So, The only thing left for the cpu will be the A.I. and why will we pay 200-1000 dollars for a cpu when almost all A.I in games sucks and don't need this kind of cpu power?

I think AMD and Intel will have to do something about it. Something like the Math co-processor in the 486 days.

I'm start to think about changing to a videogame, much cheeper and you don't have to worrie about spending 200 dollars on an add-in card every six month.

[DudeMiester]

The CPU is already an ideal design for AI. AI needs a balance between branching ability and processing capacity, which is exactly how a CPU is designed. As for ray-tracing, that will just replace rasterising videocards, since you can easily make a raytracer look like a rasteriser through driver magic. As for the PPU, I think this will make a bigger difference in games then the GPU did. Games will be able to truely come alive.

[jkabaseball]

I hope they start making motherboards with more PCI slots (PCIe I guess now). Anyone know if they will be overclockable?