AGEIA PhysX PPU Videos - Ghost Recon & Cell Factor @ PC Perspective

Linc

AGEIA’s PhysX PPU and its affect on the new Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter PC game as well as the Cell Factor demo. We have a total of 4 videos from GRAW in order to demonstrate the differences in game play with and without a PhysX card installed. The Cell Factor video is also very impressive based on the compete interactivity the user has with the environment.

Our time with the Cell Factor demo showed what a true PhysX game could potentially look like, and it is impressive. The amount of interactivity shown in our videos is unrivaled in any other title out now or that I have seen in development. Unfortunately, this puts developers in a bind -- do they create a unique title like this and require a PhysX card to play it, thus cutting out nearly all of their market initially, or do they stick to "effects physics" like we see in GRAW that don't push the envelope?

Source: PC Perspective

RWB

Wow. That's all I need to say. My next laptop will hopefully have PPU's...

Enverex

Without downloading the videos (I'm not going to wait in line then only be able to download 200MB files at 100KB/s) I can't see that it ofers much or anything more than Half-Life 2 and I can't say the physics there ever strained my machine...

lewicron

Enverex wrote:

Without downloading the videos (I'm not going to wait in line then only be able to download 200MB files at 100KB/s) I can't see that it ofers much or anything more than Half-Life 2 and I can't say the physics there ever strained my machine...

You can see a short example of the card in action during a game of GRAW here:
http://physx.ageia.com/footage.html

not the best vids, but they give an idea of the difference.

I want one of these puppies - oh yes.

Enverex

That's just BS to be honest. All they've done is up the "random things flying out from explosions" on the Physx one. Hell, I have a patch that adds that functionality to Operation Flashpoint with grenades and tank shells. Sure as hell doesn't need a Physx dedicated card or slow down the game on anything other than really old machines.

This is just like the "64bit FarCry patch" to be honest, just ramps up particle count and graphics level but actually has nothing to do with what they are trying to sell, they just market it as that because people will buy it.

lewicron

I have to disagree - I think the PhysX driven version looks markedly better. I'm downloading one of those big videos as we speak, though, so I guess i should reserve judgment until then. I'd also like to see how GPU physics processing compares: After all, who needs the 150+ Hz frame rates that you get from a high end graphics card when you could limit it to 50 or 60Hz and use the extra processing power to handle physics.

Remember, people said graphics and sound cards were pointless when they first came out.......

Enverex

Erm, you've completely missed every point I made.

First point was, yes, it does look better, but you wouldn't need a dedicated card to do that. They could make both versions look identical, but they have basically just removed all that from the non-physthing one to make their product look better, it's called MARKETING. Second, it wouldn't create issues like that in regards to frame-rate (I think you mean fps, not Hz, supprisingly games don't have an affect on your refresh rate). I mean look at Half-Life 2, that didn't run at 2fps because of everything being interactive.

lewicron

Ok - I guess you could be right about the videos. That's why I said that I'd wait until I saw the larger ones from Fileshack before I made my final judgement. You can't exactly see a great deal of detail in the ones I linked to, and they're pretty short.

As far as Hz/fps is concerned - you were right: I did mean fps. My humblest apologies. But I think you've missed the point that I was making. I'm not saying that the physics in games like Half-Life 2 reduce fps, but that maybe with a high end card you could limit the fps yourself(since you don't need anything like the number of fps that these cards can render - 50fps is about all your eye can distinguish, if not less than that) and free up processing power for even more advanced physics computations than you get in games like HL2. ATI claim that their current high-end cards can do physics computations even better than PhysX cards, so what I'm saying is that you could be right - it might well be pointless to buy one of these cards if you've already got just as good a physics processor already: your GPU.

lewicron

Enverex - having watched some of the vids from fileshack I can say you're absolutely right about the physX-ed version of Ghost Recon. very little improvement over the normal version, and to be honest I think the extra effects look a bit crappy. The Cellfactor video, on the other hand, is a different story. I recommend you have a look - certain bits of it are utterly jaw-breaking, if you ask me.

Enverex

I agree with you when it comes to the Cell Factor demo due to cloth requiring so many more computations than a basic object to compute (especially when being ripped up) and in the second video with the sheer amount of objects that are getting blown around (which will inevitably increase over time due to them having more polygons, more movable pieces etc). But what we are more likely to see than a stand-alone card is integration into existing graphics cards like nVidia have already done with the Havok engine (Ragdolls, etc) rather than people having to buy an extra third party card.

lewicron

Which is happy days, really, since the cost of a video card is prohibitive enough already.

PS that ripped up cloth does look good, doesn't it? That was what really stood out for me.