Physic cards

[gygabite]

I read at some sites (www.pcgames-hardware.de) something about physic cards, but nothing
significant except the name and i would want to know what that should be and which interface they're using(pcie x1/pci/pcie x4).

 

[Deleted member 3]

They accelerate physics, like a brick wall falling apart. It could allow quite some realistic effects though personally I don't think it'll have any succes.
They will be PCI I believe but probably appear as PCI-e 1× or something as well.
I recall pricing being around 250 USD and gamesupport being very limited

 

[gerrynicol]

yeah, game support will be limited, but you can't knock the numbers, offhand I cant remember but I think it's in the region of 10k physics calcs to arournd 300(or 3k) (again just cant remember) the tech seams good on paper, wanna see how it fairs in real life

 

[Deleted member 3]

yeah, game support will be limited, but you can't knock the numbers, offhand I cant remember but I think it's in the region of 10k physics calcs to arournd 300(or 3k) (again just cant remember) the tech seams good on paper, wanna see how it fairs in real life

I'm looking at the number saying 250, which is its price. Plus, 10K sounds nice, but do you actually know what that means? I don't. I'd rather spent that 250 USD to get a faster GPU.

 

[gerrynicol]

the chip takes the strain of the CPU, so you should spend on that upgrade. Alot of people are asking the question are they worth it now, if these cards came out a few years ago I would say yes, well worth it, but now with multiple core procs I think it may be too late for the card. Of course if you do not own a muti core'd cpu it will be worth it.

 

[Solaris17]

^ ya id get one but like dan said only certain games will support it at first.

 

[gygabite]

Would it be worth to get one for Source-Engine games(hl2,cs:s,hl2:deatmatch) and Havok physik games(gene troopers) or for fear?

 

[Aevum]

those game engines are out allready, and i doubt they will do a overhull to get them to support it,

the old 3DFX team has a chip out, and from what i´ve heard, asus built a card around it with 64mb DDR3 memory, its not out yet, still in testing, rumored retail price would be around 200 U$D,

 

[Polaris573]

With such limited support for it, I seriously doubt a $256 dollars for a card that "sometimes" works would be a worthwile upgrade. Of course, if you have a lot of money to spare and want to squeeze out every bit of performance you can from your computer then go for it. Otherwise just save the money for a new processor or video card since they'll always give you improved performance.

 

[gygabite]

I think i'll save for an M2 Dualcore processor with DDR2 support.

 

[Amdguy]

what spec is the cpu anyone know?

 

[nick255]

I think the physics chip is a nice idea and will hopefully make the gaming experience better but i think they would be better off getting the graphics card makers to add this extra logic into their video cards, rather than people having to buy a seperate dedicated physics card.

Another thing is, in the future with multicore cpu's becomming more common, will these physics cards be worth it?
When programmers could take advantage of the extra cpu cores to work out the physics instead, while probably not as good as a specifcally designed processor for physics im sure it would work just as well, and being a general purpose cpu it can be made to do more things!

With xbox360 and upcomming ps3 being multicore, this will maybe give the games programmers more experience to take advantage.

 

[tony929292]

With such limited support for it, I seriously doubt a $256 dollars for a card that "sometimes" works would be a worthwile upgrade. Of course, if you have a lot of money to spare and want to squeeze out every bit of performance you can from your computer then go for it. Otherwise just save the money for a new processor or video card since they'll always give you improved performance.

just reading though this and saw Mountain home Arkansas that were my grandparents live
i know your probaly like why the fu%k do i care well you shoundn't

 

[Solaris17]

i do beleive i saw a pic of a physics chip and i think they run at 66.6- mhz.

 

[W1zzard]

mhz isnt important there, it's how you do your calculations. if the chip can do a lot of stuff in parallel and is highly optimized to do physics calculations and nothing else, you can easily handle this with a low clockspeed

personally i dont think physics cards will be successful until there is a unified api for physics calculations like direct3d added for 3d graphics. coders do not want to develop for several different accelerator architectures + 1 software emulation .. time = money

 

[Solaris17]

i hope u didnt take my response as me worrying about the speed of the chip i was just replying to a post and adding some extra info