Ageia PhysX Card in Flight Sims?

[GGTharos]

Fluid dynamics and raycasting sounds -very- interesting from a sim perspective ... raycasting can be used for radar and ir simulation for example

[Dmut]

well, you can do raycasting by CPU, by VGA, by some audio cards, even by memory controller if you skilled and crazy enough :D The question is how effective you do raycasting? ;) who said PhysX will do it faster then audio card? ;)

as for me, I prefere to invest 200-300$ to VGA, CPU, memory or another one why-they're-so-incapacious HDD :)

[Stealth_HR]

well, you can do raycasting by CPU, by VGA, by some audio cards, even by memory controller if you skilled and crazy enough :D

 

By that analogy one'd expect LockOn to be written in x86 assembly - we do not want to be that demanding. :smilewink:

[Martillo1]

By that analogy one'd expect LockOn to be written in x86 assembly - we do not want to be that demanding. :smilewink:

 

Just OpenGL and compile it to play it in my Linux box :D

[SUBS17]

well, you can do raycasting by CPU, by VGA, by some audio cards, even by memory controller if you skilled and crazy enough :D The question is how effective you do raycasting? ;) who said PhysX will do it faster then audio card? ;)

as for me, I prefere to invest 200-300$ to VGA, CPU, memory or another one why-they're-so-incapacious HDD :)

 

Its interesting as perhaps a similar piece of hardware could expand a flightsims campaign density making it possible to have more objects interacting in the players area.

[britgliderpilot]

Its interesting as perhaps a similar piece of hardware could expand a flightsims campaign density making it possible to have more objects interacting in the players area.

 

 

Well yes - but all it really is is another processor. We've got used to games splitting processing power between graphics (graphics card) and other stuff lately . . . . . but with dual-core processors becoming the in-thing, do we really need an additional hardware processor when we've got another chip on the motherboard?

 

 

It turns into an exercise in parallel programming - where you want to offload the work to, and how efficiently you can do it.

 

We could use physics cards to offload additional CPU load to, or we could use a dual-core processor . . . . . either way, I understand it's a rather tricky thing to program.

[SUBS17]

Yeah I'm waiting until those dual cores are a bit faster before I'll buy one in which case it would be a worthwhile choice to go 64bit and get the benefits of DX10. A far better investment at the moment anyway.

[Pilotasso]

I will probably wait another year before getting any new hardware because of these late minute changes.

[Prophet_169th]

Just an FYI, the second core of a dual core CPU is not even close to as capable of processing physics as fast as a GPU/PPU, and at less than half the clock. There is just not enough pipes in a CPU.

 

If the trend continues the way it has been regarding pipelines and ATI/nVidia, I see ATI really having a superior product with DX10 if the physics is supported.

[ARM505]

Like I said earlier in this thread, adding the physics cards with their support DROPS fps in the current uses - all the cans etc bouncing around still need to be RENDERED by the gfx card to actually be displayed, hence the drop - it's yet more polygons for the GPU to push...

 

Basically all GRAW uses the physics for is better 'eye candy' (more cans/debris bouncing around) - they know they can't make it an integral part of the game yet (unlike modern gfx cards) because nobody has them. Therefore they had to make having one a 'bonus'.