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Captain Red

good lord, a physics card.

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Game makers could take the more sensible approach and properly utilize the dual (and later multi) core processors that are being sold nowadays. Properly multithread your games, take advantage of both cores, and you don't need such a coprocessor.

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if this hardware could help people understand physics(college students) then I'm all for it. but all I've seen so far is footage of a dumbass shooting a dumpster. And while we're on the subject, wouldn't you think that industry ALREADY has processors for physics?

way to take my post the wrong way. The card is alright, but their marketing department sucks balls. At least ATI has the "home movie" schtick.

and bloodshedder is correct. This will be possible for the CPU to do flawlessly with Quadcore.

By the way, Quast, you almost rivalled me in stupidity when you said that statement. Video cards =! physics cards. Video cards are a must to do ANYTHING with a computer (not picking on blind people, they have TTY and other means), while physics cards... no.

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Csonicgo said:

Video cards are a must to do ANYTHING with a computer (not picking on blind people, they have TTY and other means), while physics cards... no.

Funny I've used computers without...course it was integrated on the mainboard. If as you say "there is nothing wrong with staying with what we have at the moment". Why didn't we let the cpu continue to handle video?

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Csonicgo said:

By the way, Quast, you almost rivalled me in stupidity when you said that statement. Video cards =! physics cards. Video cards are a must to do ANYTHING with a computer (not picking on blind people, they have TTY and other means), while physics cards... no.


Except computers didn't always come with graphics cards, at least not in the same sense as graphics cards today, with independant processors and memory.

EDIT: And maybe instead of spending all of this R&D on a physics card it would be better spent making games that don't suck.

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Bloodshedder said:
Game makers could take the more sensible approach and properly utilize the dual (and later multi) core processors that are being sold nowadays. Properly multithread your games, take advantage of both cores, and you don't need such a coprocessor.

spoke too soon, well sorta. Heres one of the things the new 1.2 patch (came out today) for Q4 does:

id Software said:
With the update, systems with a single core processor which uses the Hyper-Threading Technology will have a performance jump of up to 25% compared to non Hyper-Threaded processors. Dual core processors with Hyper-Threading Technology will see a performance increase of up to 87%.

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Quast said:

Did you get upset when the first video cards were introduced as well?

I'm guessing he got upset when the industry hit 5 consecutive years without an original game.

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Yay a fissix card. Great for those games that use your processor to do massive calculations for often needless and glitzy in game physics effects. Not worth my money thats for sure (though the rest of you are free to waste away).

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I like how the term "physics" in games is a blanket term for "fancy crate collisions and something barely resembling gravity", and I bet that's pretty much the only thing that the card handles. There is more to physics than boxes tumbling down stairs in a vaguely realistic manner. Things like realistic cloth, fluid and air dynamics, momentum, magnetism, intertia, gravity, bouyancy, mass, terminal velocity and so on. Some of those things are admittedly being worked on and have been in games, but I'm sick of people blowing a load over advanced box tumbling simulations.

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I've been waiting for something like this. Hardware-accelerated physics seems like the next big thing, just like hardware-accelerated graphics was a huge leap several years ago.

If you look at the physics engines in games at the moment, we can do some pretty neat effects, but we're limited in the number of objects we can simulate because of the CPU requirements. I do see it as exactly the same as the introduction of video cards: just like there's no way that we could be doing some of the current visual effects if we were still doing software rendering, I think hardware-accelerated physics will let us do some way more impressive physics effects.

My prediction? Nobody will buy dedicated "physics" cards. They'll eventually become popular when they're smuggled onto our systems onboard the graphics cards.

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I see one major problem with the whole "physics card" idea.

We have video cards because video has no need to "talk back" to the CPU. The video card does what it's told and it prints to the monitor. A physics processor would have to "talk back" to the game, because the physics calculations performed would supposedly have a direct impact on the outcome of the game.

So when you upgrade to the newest ATI physics card, all of the sudden the hangglider in the newest Pilotwings game feels a bit different. You used to be able to finish the course in 1:30, but now the best you can do is 1:34. See the potential?

You can't separate that kind of logic from the game code.

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AndrewB said:

So when you upgrade to the newest ATI physics card, all of the sudden the hangglider in the newest Pilotwings game feels a bit different. You used to be able to finish the course in 1:30, but now the best you can do is 1:34. See the potential?

You can't separate that kind of logic from the game code.

A few years ago this would have been really important, because most games were synchronous like Doom. Game logic had to behave exactly the same way every time, or demos and network games would desync. It's less of a problem now because we do things in different ways (client-server networking, demos work differently). I really doubt that different physics cards are going to behave as differently as you suggest.

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If you totally separate physics from game code, so it's basically one-way "eye candy only" physics, then I see no real benefit. That would pretty much be a glamorized video accelerator, not really different from today's cheap tricks of bumpmapping and stenil shadowing, except it would be handling "stuff" instead of "light."

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Snarboo said:

I like how the term "physics" in games is a blanket term for "fancy crate collisions and something barely resembling gravity", and I bet that's pretty much the only thing that the card handles. There is more to physics than boxes tumbling down stairs in a vaguely realistic manner. Things like realistic cloth, fluid and air dynamics, momentum, magnetism, intertia, gravity, bouyancy, mass, terminal velocity and so on. Some of those things are admittedly being worked on and have been in games, but I'm sick of people blowing a load over advanced box tumbling simulations.


Uh, the Source Engine already has things mass, bouyancy, terminal velocity and the like.

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AndrewB said:

If you totally separate physics from game code, so it's basically one-way "eye candy only" physics, then I see no real benefit. That would pretty much be a glamorized video accelerator, not really different from today's cheap tricks of bumpmapping and stenil shadowing, except it would be handling "stuff" instead of "light."

I guess it makes sense to integrate it into the video card, then!

Seriously, I think hardware-acclerated physics will bring a whole new range of possibilities, just like hardware-accelerated graphics. HL2 has already shown some of the things that are possible with advanced physics. Besides, even if it is just used mostly for flashy visual effects, who cares?

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fraggle said:

I guess it makes sense to integrate it into the video card, then!

Which again means that it really isn't physics we're talking about here at all, it's graphics.

Seriously, I think hardware-acclerated physics will bring a whole new range of possibilities, just like hardware-accelerated graphics.

And I don't think it's a fair comparison because for the physics to be worth a dime, they have to "report back" to the game after calculations are made. GPUs don't do this; they go from program to GPU to display without feedback. And if feedback is implemented, then we're still faced with the program of what happens with an older physics card, and what happens to the game when you upgrade.

HL2 has already shown some of the things that are possible with advanced physics.

By advanced, do you mean "faked" or "scripted"? HL2 is far from a physics cornerstone.

Besides, even if it is just used mostly for flashy visual effects, who cares?

Who cares indeed, if it's just another GPU.

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AndrewB said:

I'm guessing he got upset when the industry hit 5 consecutive years without an original game.


You are correct!

so far all I've seen is the same goddamn shit with new clothes. personally I find the so called physics effects distracting to the game, because distractions in a fps=dead.

I cannot wait until games have inconsistency issues because one competitors card did shrapnel in another way than a competitors card. if physics are going to be crucial--- how the hell could you play a multiplayer game? would physics information have to be sent over the network as well?

Or will it be open source? If you were in a competitive market, what would you pick? will this create games with servers that only physics endowed people can play?

Bah, what the hell am I saying, this is going to flop like a fish on a boat dock.

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This Ageia card DOES talk back to the game, that's the entire point of it. nVidia (and possibly ATI, I haven't been paying too much attention) is already working on integrating "graphical fluff" physics processing into their card. In my opinion that makes perfect sense with the monsterous GPUs we have nowadays and I think this will be a standard feature fairly soon.

Dedicated physics cards on the other hand raise some thorny problems (as others have pointed out):

Number one, you have to somehow be able to scale the complexity of the physics for those without one of these cards without totally butchering the gameplay. This will basically force a two-tier multiplayer system, since it would be unfair for the two groups to play against each other. For single player games it's more feasible, but you might still end up with a situtation like AndrewB described where buying a physics card changes the game for the worse.

Number two, how will upgrades work? Buying a shiny new second-gen physics card shouldn't totally alter the gameplay in your old physics-accelerated games, so they'll probably have some kind of compatibility mode which will be identical to a first-gen card along with a fancy Physix 2.0 API or whatever. After a couple of generations of this we start getting into a real problem, since there will be too many platforms to support and the first-gen cards will probably be left in the cold. This will probably make physics cards even more volatile than graphics cards, and everybody just loves shelling out $600 for the latest top card every 6-months, right????

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Funny how this all goes back to a $$$$ issue. Welcome to the world of gaming, middle class need not apply.

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Csonicgo said:

I cannot wait until games have inconsistency issues because one competitors card did shrapnel in another way than a competitors card. if physics are going to be crucial--- how the hell could you play a multiplayer game? would physics information have to be sent over the network as well?

Gosh, who knows? Maybe go ask Valve and Dice how they managed to get halflife 2 and battlefield 2 to work online...or anybody that has made a game that requires collision detection in their games over a network.

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Csonicgo said:

Funny how this all goes back to a $$$$ issue. Welcome to the world of gaming, middle class need not apply.

Name me a hobby that doesn't have a market for high profile, expensive products.

In fact, gaming's AAA+ hardware and software is relatively cheap compared to any other hobby's -phile niche.

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Not really when you consider that gaming hardware is essentially consumable because you have to keep upgrading it.

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Csonicgo said:

Funny how this all goes back to a $$$$ issue. Welcome to the world of gaming, middle class need not apply.



omg look at these new things called consoles where you buy them for 300 dollars (roughly) and they last with new games that all work no matter what for 5 years. They're so cool you should try to check one out one time you know what i mean!!!

and by the way, it actually goes back to a practicality issue more than a money issue.

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remember this: Star Wars Episode IV came out in 1977, as did Apocalypse Now. both were great films then and both are great films now (and both have harrison ford in, but i digress...)

and here we are on a doom website forum, a game > 12 years old, it was a great game then and still is now.

and so to my point. the latest greatest graphics are pureley for masturbation, i've never played it but HL2 apparently scales well right down to DX7. I, on the other hand play games on my games console, a PS1, currently i'm trying to get to grips with Colin McRae rally 2.0 and starting through Spyro 1 , which i think the missus will enjoy playing too. i'm also re-paying Tomb Raider II having bought it second hand after a several year absence.

i am seriously considering getting an xbox, though, and then i can play halo 1/2 (i've played both all the way through at a friends, in coop mode) and the GTA games amongst others. maybe i'll get one for christmas this year :-)


still, back to the other points in the thread, i think this is a good diversion, sure having a box fall down stairs utterly realistically is purely a visual advantage. so long as the game's own physics "interpretation" is good enough so that gameplay can progress without it. e.g. knock a bunch of barrels down a slope to take out some monsters, it should work in game AND with uber cool physics acceleration, the latter merely being more pleasant on the eye and creating better collision responses and associated sounds.


i'm sure i had proper points to make in there somewhere but i appear to have rambled... ho hum

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Ralphis said:

omg look at these new things called consoles where you buy them for 300 dollars (roughly) and they last with new games that all work no matter what for 5 years. They're so cool you should try to check one out one time you know what i mean!!!


*looks at his worn PS2 Controller*

yup. consoles rule.

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Csonicgo said:

I cannot wait until games have inconsistency issues because one competitors card did shrapnel in another way than a competitors card. if physics are going to be crucial--- how the hell could you play a multiplayer game? would physics information have to be sent over the network as well?

All recent games use a client-server architecture, so consistency errors of the kind you describe are already a thing of the past.

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Dr. Zin said:

Not really when you consider that gaming hardware is essentially consumable because you have to keep upgrading it.

A good videocard can last you three to four years, RAM is rarely a pressing factor given how sensible minimums are generally far more than a game's requirements, soundcards are unexpensive, CPU usage, at least in gaming, is not as critical as raw video power, and a somewhat fancy processor can last five years. Yes, at the end of their lifespans there will be some tinkering with the graphical options, some stunted framerates, you name it, but $700 - $1100 over the course of several years?

Even with my third world country inflationary prices that seems decent.

I don't know, it's no $30,000 CD player or quarter of a million sports car. It's quite cheap compared to other men's fancies. You can enjoy the most pressing games without actually buying SLI'd 7900s or some quad core server.

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