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John Carmack reckons PhysX is useless

custompc.co.uk — Co-creator of Wolfenstein, Doom and Doom 3, John Carmack, has put a firm boot into the face of Ageia ’s PhysX chip, saying that ‘I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs.’

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  • opeth55, on 10/11/2007, -7/+78I didn't need him to tell me that. I have had one since it shipped in my dell xps, and all I have to show for it is being down a couple hundred bucks and a really crappy demo/game cellfactor: revolution. Is this the virtual boy of PPU's ?
    • CraigCarlyle, on 10/11/2007, -14/+95I don't know which I find more hilarious, the fact that you bought a PPU or the fact that you bought a Dell XPS.
      • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -16/+4exactly, lol
      • VeganG, on 10/11/2007, -10/+19"Dell gaming machine" is an oxymoron since a gaming machine is something you would want to be able to upgrade. Dell's proprietary form factors make that impossible. I can't respect a company that doesn't respect standards.
        • subxero37, on 10/11/2007, -1/+14My cousin has a Dell XPS. It's pretty upgradable -- I'll admit they don't stick to ATX, but they do stick to BTX, which *is* a standard.
          No overclocking or tweaking, but for upgradability, it's fine.
        • strictnein, on 10/11/2007, -4/+9"Dell's proprietary form factors make that impossible"
          What are you talking about? This isn't 1997 anymore.
          • zoom1928, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5Someone is either uninformed or trolling. I have seven Dell desktops in my office right now that were bought in either March or April that need new power supplies. They have non-standard form factors so you can't fit a real PC power supply in them. After wasting almost an hour with a drill and file to see if I could get a normal one to fit, I realized it wouldn't work anyway because Dell uses non-standard connectors to the motherboards. If you buy a Dell and something breaks, you're just screwed. Dell wants over $250 for the replacement power supplies. That sucks having to spend about 1/2 as much on a replacement power supply as we paid for the entire system. I bought a cheap $35 case at CompUSA to move the rest of the parts to, but the motherboard in the Dell doesn't fit in a real PC case. So, the only thing we're able to salvage is the RAM, hard drive, and CPU. Of course those are the few parts not made by Dell.

            Screwed by Dell once again.
        • MacSuxWindozSux, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Dells are fully upgradeable.
          Only issue is swapping mother boards, where some of the plugins in the front of the case may be hard or unable to reconnect.
          And the back where some of the plugins might be different resulting in a new back cover being needed which is usually included with the mother board.

          Oh yeah... LOL try to avoid buying a Dell
      • KiTchMe, on 10/11/2007, -1/+38Did you also buy KillerNIC? Only then will the circle be complete.
        • Stratochief66, on 10/11/2007, -1/+6Heh, thats the multi-hundred dollar ethernet card that may decrease your ping by like 2 ms?
        • msgyrd, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5I read several reviews saying that it did work...but no reviewers ever thought it was worth the money.
    • fremeer, on 10/11/2007, -0/+7maybe when unreal tourney 3 comes out which supports physx but at the moment its a $300 paperweight that cant be used as a paperwieght due to chances of static
      • tobias1482, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0that post made no sense. Somewhere there was supposed to have been a comma or period.

        Additionally, I can tell that you've never seen unreal/epic source code... It's really bad rotted ***** that needs to be thrown out and rewritten. The cruft in that thing...

        Aside from that, yes... the physx card is a fun idea but still a POS. for what it does, you'll get a lot better performance with a physics library that uses a standard multi-threaded approach. At least then, the physics engine can run as a hardware thread on either an available core or another CPU. In most cases the memory transfer to the physx card is a stall for the main engine.
        • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0That post made enough sense to get the fact that he thinks the PhysX card is a paperweight that will get damaged by ESD. Your post on the other hand... I doubt you have seen the source code to the engine and/or have the technical knowledge to make a judgement call on the quality.
        • MacSuxWindozSux, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I concur... I had no problem reading his poorly written sentence.
    • JackyJ, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Allow me to refer you to this definition:
      http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tool
  • Junkyarddawg, on 10/11/2007, -6/+45Carmack is only saying what everyone already know to be true.
    • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -2/+14just a point that carmack said the same thing in his keynote at quakecon, before ageia was released. What he sad here is basically re-affirming his stance which was there even before any of us got to see the PPU from ageia. So in some sense we only came to know this is true after he already said it wont be that popular.
    • Osjpr, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2It's *****. That means "everyone" as defined by you don't know what they are talking about, including Carmack.
    • MacSuxWindozSux, on 10/11/2007, -2/+5The tech is redundant. You don't need an extra card to handle physics when multi core chips are out.

      Just a waste of money.
  • PATSCRU, on 10/11/2007, -2/+83my cpu is my ppu.
    • KibibyteBrain, on 10/11/2007, -2/+22Or your DX10 video card. The GeForce 8800's g80 chip as well as all future DX10 chips will use a massive parallel array of scalar processors instead of vector processor pipelines. The net resut is that they will basically be like a large number of relatively simple CPU cores. This makes them perfect for multi-programming, including handling "physics" general computing tasks while also doing GPU type stuff. If you like computer architecture at all, you should really read the nVidia whitepapers on it, as well as some of the articles by people like Jon Stokes.
      • busta, on 10/11/2007, -12/+1okay to be honest, I don't know what you're talking about... but it sounds like you're full of ***** and you barely know what you're talking about yourself. Not saying I know more than you but I've heard ALOT of ***** in my life and you sound like one of them. Granted you've probably at least skimmed the information you're presenting, but the chances of you actually understanding it are farily slim. That is all.
        • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4...Except that his point is valid. Go research before you make a post like that.
        • tobias1482, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3@ busta

          first if you open a post with "I don't know what you're talking about"...

          then you probably shouldn't tell us that you don't know anything about it and then post about it.

          second, You should read those papers. They're actually pretty good and have some cool ideas.
    • longbow486, on 10/11/2007, -11/+0my Dual Core Dual Opteron's does just fine
    • po43292, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7Exactly. With quad core already here and more processor power to come, Aegia came in too little too late.
  • opeth55, on 10/11/2007, -12/+2Also the games coming out are also being built with their own internal physics processing take the upcoming half life for example. I guess I'll be putting it up on eaby.
    • zybch, on 10/11/2007, -0/+11Um NO. They are being 'build' using the Havok physics simulation system, not their own!

      Why build your own system for X dollars when you can license a proven system for 1/4 of that.
  • flamebot, on 10/11/2007, -34/+2carmack...pff

    overhyped, overrated and old news

    orcs n elves?? ffs
    • morgrar, on 10/11/2007, -2/+23...yeah. anything you play today dates back to what the guy did.
    • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -4/+15Umm dude, he is a freaking genius. His engines are by far the ones most used to date. His engines use new technology every time. The quake3 engine was reckoned as a perfect engine for the time by many developers. Just because id games are lacking a gameplay value (meaning their design team isnt that strong) doesnt mean they lack technical skills. They are gods > : (
      • VeganG, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4Their technical prowess is sometimes to their detriment. The Doom 3 engine was slammed at the time it came out for being way too demanding/costly to run its games, when the Source engine was being applauded for slightly less impressive but infinitely more scalable.
        • Giga, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1On the plus side, the Doom 3 engine is actually pretty good and runs natively on Linux as well, the fact that the gameplay of Doom 3 sucked and the gameplay of HL2 was awesome kind of put a tarnish on the engine.
  • opeth55, on 10/11/2007, -15/+1I think we all know it we just dont want to admit it.
    • VeganG, on 10/11/2007, -2/+12We don't want to admit it? Who the hell have you been talking to?
  • AzleGamer, on 10/11/2007, -2/+6Hmm, last year they were at Quakecon, hopefully they'll show up again regardless what Carmack says. They gave away some nifty stuff.
    • soupir, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4Like PPU's?
      • idonthack, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Bouncy balls. Also shirts, pens, bracelets and some hardware
  • shifty2, on 10/11/2007, -0/+25i think the main problem was that there were not that many developers writing code for it in their games, iirc Unreal had something for it and as well as a rainbow six game. plus now, multi core cpu's are everywhere and quite common. its probably easier to code for it and probably cheaper w/o a paying licensing from PhysX. $200+ for a dedicated PPU or $250+ for a quad-core intel CPU? hmmm...
    • damentz, on 10/11/2007, -9/+1Dual core processors are cheaper now too, which reduces the need for a PPU.
      • specialK16, on 10/11/2007, -0/+6Yes, um, that's exactly what shifty2 said.
    • Vektuz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5The other problem is that there's no incentive to. The effects that these cards can output will not be seen on the super-vast-majority of systems, since hardly anyone has it. On top of that, because nobody really has these cards, the effects can't really be made to alter the actual gameplay, or anything, because the game's gotta work primarily on computers that don't have the card. So they're only able to be used for extra eye candy that doesnt interact in any way (extra particle explosions and so on).
      So no developers going to bother throwing manpower at making use of it, if its useless to 99% of the install base.
      And even if it grows to a large number, like 50% of the install base, its still not going to be used for actual gameplay stuff because you STILL want a game that plays the same on both machines.
      • dragon76, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4The 90's called and 3DFX wants GLide back.
        • tobias1482, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0That was awesome!

          You actually nailed that issues with this "hardware" product!

          The software product on the other hand, is fine but not something that I'd recommend over havok.
    • dainbramage559, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2In a HardOCP test a long time ago, they tested cellfactor with and without the ppu. The results showed that even in a game MADE to be used with the PhysX showed little difference when the card was pulledout.
  • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -6/+35The logical reasoning behind his stance is that Physics algorithms change over time, they improve, new techniques are discovered. Such algorithms if hardcoded into hardware like the PPU does will not have much scalability options for if the algorithm changes or improvoes you will need a new card. For physics they all want general purpose processing so that whatever alogrithms evolve over time, they wont need new hardware. Now agiea can change their hardware and make it general purpose, but then we already have CPUs and GPUs becoming more general purpose over time.
    • Unremarkable, on 10/11/2007, -5/+3Could just have PhysX release new firmware every time theres a physics-revolution.
      • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -5/+6firmware is software like bios, from my understanding (someone correct me if I am wrong) that the physics techniques/procedures/algorithms are built into the chip, thats what I think makes it able to process so many object so fast. A frimware can change your hardware chip. Its like saying upgrade BIOS to make your geforce 7800 a geforce 8800...again I am no expert at this, but thats from my understanding.
        • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -4/+5cant* not can above. I should proof read before I submit >
      • Azio, on 10/11/2007, -1/+11Now that's just silly. A better plan would be for them to release a new $400 physics card every year or so, and require gamers to upgrade or else their games look like *****.
    • NSXDavid, on 10/11/2007, -0/+8Actually the PhysX PPU is a general purpose processor. There is no software baked in... the algorithms it executes are pushed up by the driver each time.

    • Terr01, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Well, the same is true of the math behind most graphics rendering, and the upgrade cycle doesn't seem insurmountable.
  • Vlatro, on 10/11/2007, -2/+11Physics Processing may be very promising, but at $300+ dollars, who needs it. If something like this was an integrated component on a motherboard chipset, game developers might develop games that use it. But while the majority of the market will never have one, why should developers waste so much time designing for it? They have enough bugs to track on game launches anyway, it's just one more potential problem for them. Make it a cheap and standard component and I think people would actually use it. When Asus integrates one for an additional $20 on my next Mobo, I'll get it, but I won't ever spend the kind of money they're asking.
    • ploop, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2Indeed. It's just a matter of cost. If it were $100, I'd be buying it.

      And it uses 16 PCIe lanes, right? I doubt it needs that much bandwidth. I'd be more inclined to buy one if it fit into an x1 slot.
      • ploop, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7It appears I was wrong. It uses a 32-bit PCI slot, which is worse. My current gaming box no longer has any.
    • bradleyland, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Dedicated hardware processors only work well when you have an agreed upon computational specification (like an audio/video CODEC) that will be strictly upheld, otherwise, you're just talking about a general purpose processor... which we already have.

      PPUs that work well for gaming won't be integrated on motherboards for the same reasons that GPUs that work well for gaming aren't integrated on motherboards. The problem and solution are both moving targets. As CPUs and GPUs get more powerful, software developers up the ante by introducing new requirements. E.g. the introduction of shaders. We'll see the same developments in game physics.
  • Wartyboskfapped, on 10/11/2007, -32/+5Carmack is irrelevant.
  • scabbers, on 10/11/2007, -14/+2He's right, but not because he's someone who's opinion should really count for that much since claiming Doom3 was "designed for ATI" and the fact that doom3 (and quake 3) sucked balls.
    • chalkboy, on 10/11/2007, -4/+6Quake 3 did not suck it is one of the best games ever made. I think you mean quake 4. Doom3 may of sucked but its engine is awesome.
    • zybch, on 10/11/2007, -2/+4I thought everyone knew that Id engines are great, but Id games are dreadful!
    • Darth, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7People should stop confusing the technical side of a game from its design. Its true that id games lack the replay value and as years have passed their games still feel like games of the 90s with better graphics. This however doesnt mean at all that their engines are bad. They are excellent programmers, just poor designers. This topic of discussion is coming from the person who writes the engine that so many games use t date, and the person who is claimed to be father of 3D shooters. So what he says carries enought weight.
  • trubbleshute, on 10/11/2007, -2/+23Good for John, I respect this guy more than words. I'd love to work with him, I bet I could learn more in a day with this guy than years with some apes that I know.
    • zybch, on 10/11/2007, -3/+4Isn't there a saying about how to tell a lot about a person by the company they keep.....
    • soupir, on 10/11/2007, -1/+10What a hateful zoo keeper you are.
    • Haplo, on 10/11/2007, -1/+5If that's true what's stopping you? There are plenty of good books on writing software for games, or are those "apes" keeping you away from those books. I doubt it, I think the biggest ape is you ;-)
    • Ademan, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I respect Carmack a lot too, but he's not God or anything, have you seen the q 1-3 source code? it's a mess! It defies a lot of coding standards (such as regarding globals/the singleton pattern). Carmack's real "magic" comes in the form of a handful of (awesome) math-y algorithms to give the games a kick in the ass speed-wise. That said, q 1-3 engines get the job done and have had numerous other engines built from them, and had countless games expand on them, so the engines are far from BAD, but good practices are important when you consider maintainability and reusability.
  • Jokermx, on 10/11/2007, -0/+14"Unless you want (non-persistent) debris coming from explosions in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter or a cloth flag and oil spills in CellFactor, then a PhysX card is pretty useless at the moment."

    Hmm, indeed, it's just a waste of money.
  • sand3, on 10/11/2007, -7/+0Well, I personally have 8x3GHz Xeon cores to use calculating physics, but there are still things that PhysX does faster with dedicated hardware. Maybe it's just weakness in PhysX's software mode, I don't know, but PPU is pretty good at what it does.
    There are many limitations in it's use though, so what Darth said before makes sense.
    • damentz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Here's another limitation, Windows only?
  • charityjustice, on 10/11/2007, -3/+0While I agree with his opinion on the future of dedicated physics cards, I do wonder if there was some competitive business motivations behind the timing of these comments with the forthcoming UT3 release...
  • DrBob, on 10/11/2007, -9/+3“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” --- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
    • fantasticFlan, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4Wow, Thomas Watson really turned out wrong there. What does that have to do with this?
    • kelpdip, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_misquote
    • krawkula, on 10/11/2007, -2/+3Dont count your chickens before they hatch, thats the point. One day a dedicated PPU may be useful, but not now. Thomas didnt see a need or a market for home computers, but we have them now.
      • tobias1482, on 10/11/2007, -0/+0you don't realize how easy this it to include into either a cpu or gpu. Which is mostly done in both cases.
  • opeth55, on 10/11/2007, -3/+1At the time I built my dell XPS I have to admit I did fall for the hype of the card thinking it would free up my cpu allowing it to run better. Now with now support its just taking up a pci slot.
    • Gerz1219, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1You built your Dell XPS? Did you steal it from work at the Dell factory?
      • tendonut, on 01/29/2008, -0/+1Didn't you know? Clicking on an item on a list is the same thing as building nowadays. I also built my car. I bet this guy also hacked into his mom's computer by guessing the passwords and entering them by hand.

        /sarcasm
  • opeth55, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1That's to funny Craig. My whole life I have built my own and this time I just wanted to have someone save me all the work. I was able to get a real nice one for $2000 using their employee purchase program.
  • yournamehere, on 10/11/2007, -17/+2John Carmack is a has-been. What has he done lately besides ruin Doom, whore Quake into QuakeWars (developed by another company) which sucks (`i'm in the beta) and introduce Mega-Textures which except for the fact that it's about 5 years too late is just pure genius.

    My video card already has 640 meg onboard, i dont need that tech now.. like 5 years ago - yes but not now.

    Commence digging down in 3..2..1

    • strOphe, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3zero. people trash Carmack for the games he puts out because they don't like the game play (forgetting he actually has very little to do with that side of game development). Ask people in the industry who actually take the time to make engines and you will realize Carmack is virtuoso at what he does. I will agree the creative team behind iD has been a little stagnant and I think they could be more cautious about who they hand their franchises to but the actual engines are quite impressive.
  • gdgi, on 10/11/2007, -2/+17The biggest downfall to PhysX is the proprietary, closed source physics library that they force everyone to use. Instead of just providing an API that anyone could implement support for, they force you to use THEIR physics engine in order to implement whatever you want to do on PhysX.

    This is why GRAW had two physics engines in the game - one for the 'real' physics (havok) and one for the 'fluff' physics (ie particles). Completely useless in it's current state.

    As it stands now, you have Ageia on one hand, and every other game engine & technology developer on the other. Of course it's dead in the water. There's no incentive to support it.

    Now if they had an API that companies like Havok (or other Physics vendors) could provide a seamless layer of support for, then it wouldn't such a huge hastle for developers to implement games using their technology.

    Basically all we'd need to do is check to see if they have a PhysX card, and if so, spawn fancy extra effects. If not, just spawn the 'normal' physics stuff.

    Of course online games make this a whole other layer of complicated, since if you have PhysX and non-PhysX players in the same game, balancing the two is impossible without making the PhysX version disabled.

    Crytek is running into similar situations with their Dx10 / Dx9 versions of Crysis. Dx9 players won't be able to play against Dx10 players because the destructible geometry is Dx10 only. Suddenly what was a near-impossible task before (shipping a fun multiplayer game) becomes exponentially more difficult - shipping effectively TWO fun multiplayer games simultaneously.
    • Reno582, on 10/11/2007, -3/+2What they would need to do is make the multplayer maps non-destructible.
    • Terr01, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Not to mention that any complex physics which have effects on more than one player (e.g. explosion blows hole in ground) have to be calculated on the server for an authoritative view of "how the game work looks".

      So you're either pushing the end result "hole looks like this, rubble flies on these vectors" to a client, or else the clients are doing a "best guess" render for the player that is later synced to the authoritative view.

      In the former case, most of your physics processing is happening on the server. In the latter, you need a physics engine rigorous enough that given about the same initial parameters everyone gets about the same outcome, and what with the chaotic nature of certain complex effects...
  • Reno582, on 10/11/2007, -1/+11Multi-threaded games for the win...?
  • kidcodea, on 10/11/2007, -8/+1i agree with carmack , but he forgot to include his games and gfx engines.
    useless.
    • strOphe, on 10/11/2007, -0/+4Wrong.

      this is just for the quake 3 engine:

      * Quake III Arena (1999) — id Software
      * Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force (2000) — Raven Software
      * American McGee's Alice (2000) — Rogue Entertainment
      * Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.² (2000) — Ritual Entertainment
      o James Bond 007: Agent Under Fire (2001) — EA Los Angeles (this was to be a PS2 and Windows version of the PlayStation and N64 game The World is Not Enough that was ultimately cancelled; it is based on the modified FAKK2 code base)
      + James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (2004) — EA Black Box
      o Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) — 2015, Inc. (based on the modified FAKK2 code base)
      + Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Spearhead (2003) — EA Los Angeles
      + Medal of Honor: Allied Assault - Breakthrough (2003) — TKO Software
      * Quake III: Team Arena (2000) — id Software
      * Return to Castle Wolfenstein (2001) — Gray Matter Interactive (SP) / Nerve Software (MP)
      * Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (2003) — Splash Damage
      * Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix (2002) — Raven Software
      * Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast (2002) — Raven Software
      * Star Wars Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy (2003) — Raven Software
      * Star Trek: Elite Force II (2003) — Ritual Entertainment
      * Call of Duty (2003) — Infinity Ward
      * Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) — Gray Matter Interactive
      * Severity (2007) — Cyberathlete Professional League
  • lordmetroid, on 10/11/2007, -7/+3No, I need a PPU! Physics is as important as graphics. Requires lots of diff equations and I want my game worlds to be totally awesome and behave in the way where I can destroy things in an awesomely realistic manner! Yeah! Bring on real world physics and all the multitude of partial differential equations needed to calculate all the changes in the world at every instance!

    I want to dominate the world. Not have it static and unchangeable!
    • soupir, on 10/11/2007, -0/+5With this comment you have dominated our virtual world and left us the opposite of static and unchangeable. You are your own PPU, my friend.
  • schoate09, on 10/11/2007, -10/+1IM IN UR COMPZ PROCESSING UR PHYSICZ.
  • hilomania, on 10/11/2007, -2/+8I've been doing programming stuff and visualizations on PhysX for a while now. I work for a large corporation where we use PhysX fro visualizations. We can do things we couldn't afford before with a $300 graphics card in a system. It's a chicken and egg thing. Until Physics cards get cheap enough to put into a motherboard nobody will support them. (The first Quake game was also available unaccelerated; my first 3D programming was on SGIs selling for upwards of $20k). The only comment I agree with so far is the fact that a proprietary API is probably not a good idea.
    • mabhatter, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2I think cost is the bigger part of the problem. Intel is killing off pretty much everybody else making chips to keep the cost per comptuer in their favor.. they have dual core, integrated graphics, sound, networking, usb, wireless... look at "centrino to" see how they are pushing out other choices. AMDs not faring much better having to buy ATI to get chipsets and graphics to add to their designs because they have to control costs to manufacturers.

      In that environment, what can Ageia do with a part that costs OEMS $150 to buy? Today's average systems are so unblanced .. they have super fast processors but play games like 4 year old systems... it's awful. There's no reasonable standard for a "gaming PC" with the current market, by John's same standard, any 3d card over $150 is a waste of money also.. by the time it's taken for developers to USE the chips, new ones are out, all you get is sloppy developer programming for "what's going to be" instead of what IS now.
  • mellowcool, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0If John Carmack says it's useless then it must be! End of story.
  • markdall, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2Actually, there's something I've wanted for years: Physics acceleration and overall FPS style 'universe'/environment, in an MMORPG. Think WoW with gravity, flowing water with currents, etc.

    Someday... someday. I've been waiting at least a decade now.
    • venom8599, on 10/11/2007, -1/+7I think most games have gravity already...
      • fremeer, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2not true gravity, imagine in UT that if u had the redeemer you would fall faster than with the translocater because of the increased mass. Now imagine having worlds in space actually had more or less gravity instead of just an arbitary multiplier on how high u jump.
    • mitrovarr, on 10/11/2007, -1/+2The problem with that is bandwidth, server processing power, and keeping clients consistent with one another over a large scale. There's a reason that good physics exist in games like UT2004 and Half-Life 2 but not in WoW - it is a far taller order to make good physics in an MMORPG than a normal game.

      Good physics in MMORPGs will probably have to wait for faster broadband connections, more powerful servers, and most importantly, until people demand it. Most massive multiplayer games are RPGs where physics isn't critical and all things are done by numbers, so there's little demand right now.
  • Vektuz, on 10/11/2007, -1/+3I agree with carmack here, and I dev games too.
    We do NOT need a dedicated physics card. We might have a physics chip or a better / different vector math processor as part of the CPU builds (like the floating point processor was originally) but theres literally no need for some addon card to do this.

    Even then, the mere fact that some people have it, and some people don't, means that online multiplayer games must support the lowest common denominator, ie, those without it - and that means the effects that these chips/cards can do will always be limited to only visual, non-interactive effects like particle explosions and stuff.
  • RawOysters, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Can somebody tell me why you are required to install the Ageia Driver when you install GRAW even if you DON'T have a physics card?
    • ziffel, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1Yep, highly annoying, and I don't think the game will run without it installed. I've seen a few other games require the PhysX driver as well.
    • Veraiste, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1I'm not exactly sure, but I would guess it comes down to a combination of the following:
      A) Simplifies building the installer
      B) I think they can program using the Ageia driver and the driver just turns off effects if the card is not present.
  • pmsyyz, on 10/11/2007, -0/+2The linked article is based on an Inquirer article which is based on http://www.bootdaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=649&Itemid=56&limit=1&limitstart=1
  • Gamb10r, on 10/11/2007, -2/+0I love these things and the people who have them! *serious*
    Its so unecessary and just screams hardcore, I want one! Who cares theres only support for a hand few of games, you have a card that does Physics! If only they where around when i was in highschool i could have aced that subject.
  • mitrovarr, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Physics processors will never catch on unless games require them. Right now, all they achieve is to improve the way the physics *looks* - the games still play identically because they have to run on systems without physics accelerators, and the physics have to be consistent for multiplayer. This means that the improved physics the card provides can't affect any of the actual rules, just the way things are rendered. It turns the expensive physics card into basically an auxiliary graphics accelerator that only works in a few games. The improvement they generate isn't all that great, either.

    Unless they improve dramatically, games are never going to do that. It took games that improved dramatically with a graphics accelerator like Quake and Unreal to make those commonplace enough that games could start requiring them. Physics accelerators cost about what those first graphics cards did, but they don't accomplish nearly the improvement and they're even less consistent between games. Plus, there's the DX10 thing where graphics cards work for accelerating physics too.

    They're pretty much dead in the water.
  • xGeneric, on 10/11/2007, -2/+2What happened to Doom 2?

    No respect.
  • JackyJ, on 10/11/2007, -0/+1my GPU is my PPU:
    http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=147573&use_mirror=superb-east&filename=bullet-2.1-win32demo.zip&78306958
  • Kwipper, on 10/11/2007, -5/+1*looks at Carmack and smirks.*

    DUH! YA THINK!?
  • Osjpr, on 10/11/2007, -4/+1Most of digg have proven themselves to be sheep. More power=Better. It's that simple. Just because game developers (LIKE CARMACK) choose not to do cool ***** with physics, doesn't mean a dedicated PPU is useless. There are all sorts of physical simulations that would benefit from a PPU. Unfortunately game developers are not creative enough and/or too lazy to utilize the extra power. Doom 3 sucked Carmack. It's your fault.

    BURIED as LAME
  • SaxxonPike, on 10/11/2007, -1/+1The guys making those physics cards need to figure out how to make developers NEED them. As far as I'm concerned, it's just something to plug a hole in your motherboard and occupy a slot in back of your PC.
  • Aquashark, on 10/11/2007, -1/+4"Co-creator of Wolfenstein, Doom and Doom 3"
    err.. Quake is their biggest franchise you console n00b.. how can you miss that?
  • sark666, on 10/11/2007, -4/+2This is The Carmack. Where is the Daikatana!? I must have the Daikatana!!
    • gfnw, on 10/11/2007, -0/+3Protip: John Romero, not John Carmack.
      • sark666, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I didn't think many(any) would get this. Way back when, there was this guy (nicked named immy) who did some online radio show and sometimes did prank calls. One call was to some chinese restaurant, saying in an almost yelling voice, "This is The Carmack. Where is the Daikatana!? I must have the Daikatana!!". Reading it alone doesn't sound too funny, but the call was funny as hell.

        It caught on at the time and all the gaming sites (shacknews, bluesnews etc) referred to john carmack as 'the carmack' whenever there was id software related news. But this was almost 10 years ago now, so again didn't think any of you would get it. I googled it but couldn't find the original audio clip, too bad.
  • Ignathius, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1nice to see everyone so well informed about the Physx cards.

    for starters, they're not as expensive as everyone seems to think they are. 300$+? please. try 145$ shipped.
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814143055&Tpk=physx

    while it's true that not many games use Physx yet, that list is growing. hell think back to when quake first came out. 'a monster 3d video card? what a waste of money. the only game that makes use of it is quake...' Physx is in it's early stages, but it's doing the same thing that happened back then. it's taking some of the load off of the CPU to make the game look better. for now, it's an add-in card. in the very near future, i see it being a standard option in video cards (monster 3d piggyback card anyone?). and with the lineup they have, i see Physx becomming more mainstream very soon.

    with UT3 supporting Physx, expect to see these cards drop below the 100$ price point soon, and the number of sales of Physx cards going up along with the number of copies of UT3 sold.


    • Kelmon, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1The problem with PhysX, and the idea of add-on PPUs, is that they are a fundamentally BAD IDEA. PPUs introduce yet another component to your PC that, if they become "the norm" will need to be constantly upgraded. With the advent of multi-core processors, and with the cost of these processors plus the number of cores available decreasing and increasing respectively, you can no doubt do what a PPU proposes to do with a general-purpose core that you can also use for other jobs. I hate the idea that I'd have another chip in my computer that sits idle for much of its life while I'll no doubt have spare capacity in my processors.

      The whole idea is bonkers and too late. Don't throw your money away on these useless add-on cards.
  • kakifry, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2the doom3 engine looks like crap and runs more slowly than it could if it were rewritten cleanly
  • evildracula, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Epic > iD

    'nuff said
  •  

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