GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support

Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed that it will soon introduce PhysX physics processing support into all of its GeForce 8-series graphics cards through a simple software download. PhysX support will allow the cards to accelerate physics effects in games.

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14147

 

Are they implying that the hardware is already built in, or just a 'software' render for the physics?

 

I'm pretty sure it's a software render, but the physics should be better.

 

It's hardware rendered, but instead of telling a PPU to do it the more efficient and powerful Stream Processors of the GPU will do it in GPGPU mode.

It's just as software as the Ageia PhysX engine is now, they just front end the command changes to run their SLi Phsyics, re-dubbed Quantum Effect Processing. Just a tweak here and a tweak there, and voila Phsyics on the GPU, like AMD and nVidia were hoping Havoc would get around to doing (before they were bought by intel).

CUDA like CTM are already being used for this in non-gaming situations, this is just going to finally bring the dream of 3+ years ago (with early brooks processing) to reality.

http://www.gpgpu.org/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/Miscellaneous/index.html

 

That sounds like very exciting news...can't wait for this to come out! Imagine that, a significant upgrade to your Geforce 8 card with a software download only!

 

u beat me to it brkhobowriter, i was just about to post this
amazing news, makes me even happier i bought my xps1530
any idea wat games PhysX supports

 

Sure;
http://www.ageia.com/physx/titles.html

But really the main titles are GRAW / GRAW2, City of Villans (and some spinoff), and UT3.

Warmonger and CellFactor are Ageia's demo games.

 

Well I'm pretty sure that my next lappy will be one with a Nvidia.

 

Sweet! I guess I won't have to trash GRAW 2 (damn hard game)

 

How sweet is this really though? I can possibly see an SLI setup utilizing this as one card can have more dedicated power going toward physics. Just because it is a software download doesn't mean that the card in your system will have to allocate resources to "emulate" this code. I am no programmer but that is just a hunch. I have a feeling this could actually have a negative effect due to emulating software on a GPU that is designed mainly to specialize in other tasks.

 

Yeah, and there's the extra level in GRAW 2 too...

 

I thought with the new 8 architecture the shaders could specialise in whatever task they get given code for?

 

Impressive. This is certainly a lot faster than I'd expected. Cool though.

Not quite. They can do any of the tasks they've been built to do. Which is essentially what DirectX10 requires. They only support a certain set of instructions, which is static and unchanging. What NVidia *can* do is write drivers that try to translate new kinds of tasks into a list of the instructions the GF8 supports.

Or to put it another way, if you ask the GPU to multiply 4 numbers by 4 other numbers, it doesn't care whether you want the result to be used in a pixel shader, a vertex shader or something entirely different. it's an instruction it understands, so it's able to do it.
If you ask it to find the square root of something, it understands that instruction as well, and will do that.

Then again, that's fundamentally no different than a CPU works. The only difference is that the instructions understood by a GPU are still far more limited than a CPU.

 

Aha. Cool, thanks for the info.