Lets Get Extreme! PhysX watercooling with Pics !

[jayhall0315]

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)