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Lets Get Extreme! PhysX watercooling with Pics !
Well, I suck at posting photos evidently and I've got a lot to do this weekend but in preparation for some more Showdown at High Noon articles coming out next week, I thought you guys might like a few shots of my attempts to watercool and even overclock a PhysX card (just dont let Ageia know that I reverse engineered their drivers).
The top photo shows the BFG PhysX card with a custom drilled 8800 mounting bracket for use with the MCW60 block, and the bottom pic is obviously, this suckka getting put to the test. We'll see what she is capable of Captain, when I get around to punching out the Showdown Part III or IV article next week.
Have a good weekend,
Jay
If you are really extreme, you never let informed facts or the scientific method hold you back from your journey to the wrong answer
The Perils of Multithreading
While I am no John Carmack, I do do multithreaded coding at my lab for the BMI interface and there are some good points to be made:
Dan from Ageia, said this:
“When it comes to the CPU side, dual-core, quad-core, whatever then the main problem is threading. How are you ever going to thread the two things together? It’s all about timing, when the physic effect hits then how is the second core going to time it and cooperate? At the moment, there’s not a single game that supports multi-threading even at a basic level. I reckon we’re years out with that and it’s already been about for two years. The games that are being developed now only use it a bit, for A.I. and so on where they don’t need extreme threading.”
While, I do not entirely agree with Dan, this idea that you can just pull out a Harry Potter magic spell and poof !, have full multithreaded physics running off your GPU or quad core CPU is bunk. Yes, it is possible, but once again, at a very large investment in coding and resources that game and hardware companies are just not going to devote to the matter at this time. That leaves Ageia. Yes, the effects are not as crucial to gameplay as many had hoped for, but it is just like the early 3D accelerators back in the 1990s. You dont master a new paradigm in only six months (Hell, Nturd still has bugs with getting SLI to work).
What would be really cool is if Nturd would sign a licensing agreement with Ageia (like Auzentech did with Creative) and then when the Nturd 9900 cards come out in November, the PPU could lay right beside the GPU on the same board.
Oh well, one can dream.
Jay
(and no, I do not work for Ageia, I just think the PhysX has merit)