Tuesday, April 15th 2008
NVIDIA CUDA PhysX Engine Almost Complete
Although NVIDIA bought AGEIA Technologies only two months ago (on February 13, 2008), the GeForce creator informed recently that the conversion of AGEIA's PhysX API engine to CUDA programming language that interfaces with the GPUs is almost complete. Upong completeion of CUDA, owners of GeForce 8 and 9 series graphics cards will be able to play PhysX-enabled games without the need of an additional AGEIA PhysX PCI card. The big question here is, how much will this PhysX addition worse the frame rate in games. Well for now we only know that NVIDIA showed off a particle demo at its recent analysts day that was apparently similar to Intel's Nehalem physics demo from IDF 2008. For the record, the Nehalem demo managed 50,000 - 60,000 particles at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), while NVIDIA's demo on a GeForce 9800 card achieved the same level of particles at an amazing 300 fps, quite a boost. NVIDIA's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) in theory can double this score to top 600 fps. Manju Hegde, co-founder and former CEO of AGEIA added that in-game physics will be the "second biggest thing" in 2008.
Source:
TG Daily
53 Comments on NVIDIA CUDA PhysX Engine Almost Complete
For example, the spanish Steam survey is broken. It hasn't let me send it since 2005, and there was an issue with HL2:EP2 not releasing in spanish because they saw at the survey less than 4000 spanish users, even though we are more than 100.000 making a conservative aproximation. For Valve, based on the info that I've sent, I'm still running a P4 2,5 GHz and 6800 GT. I wonder how many people are there with this same problem.
Also I highly doubt there are more 8800s than lower end 8 series cards. I doubt there are so many nv 5200, ati 9600, nv 6600 at this moment, Amd HD series are nowhere to be found...
Let's have a look at the game sales. In conjution with the number of discrete graphic cards sold we can make a better idea of the user base than with that survey:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games#PC
If you look at the PC charts 50 million Sim copies have been sold. I doubt even half the gamers have bought the Sims. I know, you don't need a powerful card for the Sims, if at all, but indicates that gamers are alot more than just 10 million or 1 million as valve survey suggests.
Crysis on the other side of the performance spectrum has sold over 1 million copies. This suggest there are at least 1 million people with capable cards, but again not everybody with a new high-end card has bought Crysis, so the user base is bigger.
Retailer purchases VS consumer pruchases, many games are still sitting on the shelf of retailers.
Not everyone uses these to game, I have a X1650Pro, X1800XT, X800 for work machines.
The list was up to date as of last year.
I know it encompasses most english native countries.
If you have a reliable broad based information source please point me to it.
But history dictates future in most cases, Ageia failed due to many reasons, Nvidia is not tackling the biggest with this release, ATI is not tackling it with their ideas either. It is more of a small nitche currently and unless it becomes more widely supported it will remain that way for the immidiate future.