PPU = Physics procesing unit???

An ign article about crytek's upcoming Crysis mentions something called a PPU.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/705/705150p2.html

Thanks to an engine that allows for reaction of a ton of different objects (especially with the help of the unified architecture DX10 design, upcoming GPUs, and PPUs) jungles now become more than stagnant cover.

So is a PPU a physics processing unit??? Somebody had told me that card makers were gonna start puting an extra procesing component onto video cards to help handle physics, but i wasn't sure if it was true or not.

 

PPU also stands for picture processing unit and power processing unit, but in this case i think it means power processing unit

 

Physics Processing Units are coming out this month -- see http://physx.ageia.com

 

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751

 

a PPU is a Physics Processing Unit. i tink what it is suppose to do is capture the explosions and shake your room or something...................................?)

 

Sort of...from what I heard, it's supposed to take the calculation loads off the CPU. It's supposed to calculate reactions from the interaction of different objects at the same time such as collisions, but I still have to see how it really works since even though it may project the way a body should fall (for instance), I don't know if the software can project the graphics specified by the PPU (meaning that you won't see a body falling the same way every time you play since from what I understood due to chaos theory, the same event does not happen the same way every time). Or maybe I'm just going to far away.

 

ill try to describe what i have heard using BF2 (i do not know if BF2 will or wont be supported, so do not hold me to this)..

you are fighting a guy, and he runs inside a building..being the anti-tank kit, you could take your rockets, and blow up the building burning him inside for a kill..

say you are fighting as spec ops (with c4), and you rig a bridge..now 2 tanks from the opposite team come driving over it..you can blow up the bridge, mkaing it collapse with lifelike explosions.

this is what i have heard, and do not know if any of this is true..i will look all this up later..back to my 5-10 page philosophy report due thursday.

pb,out.

 

PB you are right. Also, in same such as Fear and Oblivion...when you shoot a person and get the kill...the realistic physics kick in, how the body falls, which way it will fall...if it will fall over a railing...bullet holes in walls, etc. Alot of this stuff will be handled by the PPU to take a load off the CPU so you can do other things.

 

The Aegia PhysX thing seems cool to me at first, but Microsoft announced they have a physics API in the works which I'm sure will take advantage of the unified shader architecture supported by DX10. Between ATI, nVidia, Havok, and Microsoft all working on physics APIs, Intel and AMD releasing quad-core CPUs by year's end, I'm betting the PhysX card will be obsolete within a year, regardless of its theoretical power. I may have read the benchmarks wrong, but Anandtech's review made it obviously clear that the PhysX card suffers from poor bandwidth to the CPU/RAM, effectively reducing framerates... All will probably be fixed once they unleash a PCI-E version, but are people willing to spend $300 on top of the costs of graphics cards? At the bleeding edge, probably... but not mainstream.

 

If they cross the physics engine to PCI-E then I think it will help out alot. I agree with the fact that quad-core's might take out the need for a physics engine, but with the way games are now, I could see it staying for a while. Look at Oblivion, even on SLI configed 7800GTX's its framerates hit like 60+ from what I have seen. If the physics engine were to help out by 10-15FPS, I think alot of people will want it.

Just my $.02

 

Hence my disclaimer for the "bleeding edge". People will buy this thing, no doubt... I just don't think it will be as impressive as we move forward with other physics APIs. Having the support of Unreal Tournament 2007 doesn't hurt though... I can't wait for that game!

 

From what i've heard about Crysis, your gonna be able to shoot limbs off of trees and cuase damage when they fall, and the environments are going to be very destructable. It sounds like you're definitley gonna want a ppu or reeeeeally beefy cpu for that game.

 

Two nice links:

AGEIA PPU:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/622-1/preview-ageia-physx.html

CRYSIS:
http://www.maxitmag.com/content/view/456/249/

Enjoy,

Ivan