[comanighttrain]

hey guys, anyone seen or heard of physics cards? I seen one in overclockers.co.uk, just wondering if anyone has used one or can tell me what the results are like?

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Is this what you are looking for?

http://physx.ageia.com/

SRX660

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Is this what you are looking for?

http://physx.ageia.com/

SRX660

[p-zero]

O SNAP! Looks like I might have to get one of these!!!!!
-P.

[comanighttrain]

yeah, it looks like it could be the next "thing" after HDR

[warriorscot]

Nah really wouldnt get one, Nvidia and ATI are working on there own physics card technology that should come integrated with the gfx cards if they are succesful they are working with Havok to do it so should be good.

Seperate processing units for physics i think will be something to look fordward to in the future however seperate cards i dont think will be part of it, you know if you could modify the driver and had a dual core CPU you could use the extra core to run the physx the ageia system runs perfectly well standalone WITHOUT the card.

[comanighttrain]

true...but does that have its own memory etc....

The obvious solution is as you said, integrate it with the Graphics chip. Tho i guess theyll start calling them gaming chips or something.

[warriorscot]

Well if you run it on your CPU then you can use your system memory, and if they put it on the gfx cards it would have 512Mb to a gig of DDR4 ram to play with which would be a good thing.

[Seven!]

The whole idea of a tri-core reminds me of the Xbox 360. I wonder....

Anyway, the Xbox 360 has three CPUs, each dedicated to a different task (I wonder if they share a cache), It's really nice how efficient they work, considering how low their clock speeds are.


Heeeey, will this replace my video card completely? If I had an SLi setup, would I be able to do a GPU and a PPU? Or would the SLi setup on its own be more efficient? (Or Crossfire instead of SLi).

And it says that there will be PCI and PCI-e versions (as so the Wikipedia entry tells anyhow), will the PCI version suffer horribly due to the fact that the PCI bus rate is 33MHz shared across all of the slots? D:

Edited by Seven!, 20 April 2006 - 06:28 PM.

[warriorscot]

It doesnt have three CPUs it has one CPU and three cores, its just like the multi core athlons and intels. They do share the same cache and memory. They are just low clocked cool running power PC chips like they put in macs back in the day. The efficiency comes from the coding consoles are slower than pcs but because the systems are all identical they can be optimised to a greater degree.

[Seven!]

I edited my post, woo go ahead and answer my questions .

Oh yes, my bad, three cores, not three CPUs.

Edited by Seven!, 20 April 2006 - 06:41 PM.

[warriorscot]

Not to sure about your question, the physics processor would be independant and only handle physics operations like a sound card does sound. It will go in noe of the x1 or x4 slots not a x16.

[Seven!]

Sweet, I have an x4 slot and two x1 slots open =].

[warriorscot]

I still wouldnt even consider getting one right now though.