Gameguru Mania

[ggrobot]

Ageia PhysX 128MB vs. 256MB - Ageia's PR rep revealed that both companies will ship only 128MB cards for now. Intel Core versus AMD's K8 architecture - The Core CPU is simply a wider, more efficient and more out of order CPU 90% of Intel mobile chips to be dual-core by 2007 - Intel expect

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[Sabot]

Ageia is simply cutting it's (potential) loses or hedging it's bets; 128mb is more practical and safer to release than a WHOOPING 512mb card. Like *ordinary* 512mb cards are flying off the shelves...not!
It's taken an age to release and sell ORDINARY 512mb cards as it is and seasoned gamers are very wary of the 'hype' that surrounds technology 'promises' like this. (one trick pony springs to mind) Only BFG and Asus plugging these cards and all reliant on software houses SUPPORTING you new $$$$$ card...erm no thanks!

Besides playing GRAW in software physX mode is cool enough -which is what most gamers will say. Physics is nothing new, it's graphics and gameplay (fps) that matter most and to go splash on a card for just a feature is crazy.

Is it another phase that will die out? wait and see.

[xxxx]

This whole physics card thing is a joke. But since there are morons out there that buy anything and everything new that comes on store shelves I guess they figure there's enough rich people out there to scoop these up. As for memory on video cards. There's never been a problem putting more memory on a card Stumpus, it's whether the games would use it. Not many games even use 256 as it is.. You will also notice there is not much of a speed gap with more memory. This whole physics card thing is just pushing the more experienced and knowledgable gamers away from PC gaming. It's become worse than a joke for the gouging that goes on. And honestly, wtf is AGEIA????? Established in 2002.. pfff. A 'Physics' card, ALL it does is "Physics", does shit for your desktop, your applications or ANYTHING $300? It's not even a video card. Give me a fucking break...Gouge a little more guys..we all know there's a sucker born somewhere who's ego will go through the roof after he buys this card..Someones weewee is gonna get a little bigger..

In my day, you go to school and gloat about your pc nobody gave a shit, you got pounded out for being a loser or made fun of. Today, kids warship one another after they spend they paper route money and blow it all on gaming hardware..

Physics card or not, I'll kick their ass online.

[Sabot]

Not a very clever reply Bill, 'eat' and 'words' sound appropriate. If you had actualy *read* the fact that it's soley dependant on software being wrote for it then it's hardly got much going for it already eh? (the Ageia)
It is a fad. 60+ software signed up so what, even so, more folk will run software than buy a card just for some fancy affects... as long as a dev gets a game out the door that's the main thing in their eyes. The Ageia bit is just hype. If it was crytical that you *needed* a physx card to play anything then that figure would be -60 developers un-signed. As it is you can still play it just fine.

The fact that they have binned 256mb card speaks volumes!

SLI is another fad,(again) the performance claims aren't justified to spend hundreds on another graphics card to gain a miniscule increase in fps and your stuffed with LCD anyway, as far as resolution goes LOL!!
Just as it was when 3DFX done the whole voodoo2 SLI thang back in the early 90's -yeah i was around building my first 3D machine, but wasn't spending today's prices on another voodoo2 to get 1024x768 out of the -then- 640x480 games.

Got to laugh at you, hell there's thousands of folks playing HL2 on ANCIENT GeForce 6600 and Radeon 9600s than there is playing anywhere *near* a 7800 or radeon next-gen. http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
LOL how much time do these folks need to upgrade? HL2 is old-hat, the engine is dead compaired to Oblivion or FEAR yet we have more folk still stuck in the dark ages.

We are still waiting for folk to actualy move to HDR instead of BLOOM!

Yeah give it time he says.....web sites that plug stuff like this are no different from the stuff that 3DMark says is next gen, 'test your card with it' -pure gimmick.

Next

[miglaugh]

I'd like to know where all this hatred came from...

Doesn't it make logical sense for the physics processing to be moved off of the CPU? CPU's are bottlenecked to hell these days and the kinds of physics that I hope for would only make things worse. Ageia is just doing the exact same thing that 3dfx did. People were bitching about glide3d as an API back then too, but then look what happened... glide went away, but the technology didn't.
Dedicated physics processing is coming. Whether you want it or not is up to you. But I can't wait to have my card and be able to turn on features that completely change the gameplay while everybody else is stuck with the collision detection of a 2 year old. It's not going to accelerate current crap and that shouldn't matter... What's important is where things can be taken in the future. It's all about being able to go beyond current capabilities, not making the current shit faster. Innovate first, then optimize.

I just think the problem is that you're having trouble imagining what will be possible with this kind of technology. Thats fine, but don't treat it like it's worthless.

There are only 2 areas left in gaming that have yet to be revolutionized: Physics and AI. Physics will be taken care of next, and then AI. Watch and see.

If it's not Ageia it WILL be someone else.

[Sabot]

miglaugh, it's not 'hatred' it's just a case of been-there-got-the-t shirt heard it all before.
Every company plugs something nowadays because the market is saturated. Nothing very rarely hits the ground running and makes an immediate impression does it? So they have to pump up their products to make them the next best thing since gravity, that's all very well but it costs a lot of bucks to have a GPU that sits dead on your card when the software doesn't materialise OR the effects just don't become fun anymore.

AI (as in Operation Flashpoint) was the finest i have seen, Far Cry was good also. We have Havok which is brilliant in games like FEAR or Oblivion, so we are advancing along the right routes in gaming.

Anyway this is a hands-on report of playing GRAW on a AGEIA PhysX system -it highlights exactly why i say it's a fad. You cannot cut your nose off to spite your face in the games market. People will NOT be forced to go buy a card to JUST play a game(s) that support PhysX. That's why we have consoles; what you don't want to upgrade for on PC you just buy for your XBox/360 or PS2/3. That is why i say it will fade away or PhysX will be on games but more played with software mode instead but not SOLEY hardware.

"PCPerspective gives you their thoughts and impressions of the AGEIA PhysX processor after getting a little hands on action with an AGEIA equipped gaming system. They also have posted some videos that show the benefit of a PhysX PPU.
In Ghost Recon, the differences between having a PhysX card and not having one are not as dramatic as I had first hoped they would be. Honestly, it would be a hard sell to most users to ask them to pay as much as $250 extra for a product that performs only what we saw here. There is no doubt that in our videos we see a much more complex system of physics at work -- the sparks and car descruction are more detailed, the amount of "rubble" from shooting the ground or buildings is definitely more complex and realistic and the various particle systems (dirt and smoke) are more impressive -- but are they $250 more impressive? Probably not, but with other titles such as Unreal 2007 coming out with even more advanced usage models on the PhysX PPU the market will eventually get there.

Our time with the Cell Factor demo showed what a true PhysX game could potentially look like, and it is impressive. The amount of interactivity shown in our videos is unrivaled in any other title out now or that I have seen in development. Unfortunately, this puts developers in a bind -- do they create a unique title like this and require a PhysX card to play it, thus cutting out nearly all of their market initially, or do they stick to "effects physics" like we see in GRAW that don't push the envelope? It's the same issue that AGEIA and company have been having to address with developers since the technology was first announced last year.

[miglaugh]

Yeah,

I guess Ageia isn't the same kind of company 3dfx was in it's beginning. And maybe physics can't be advanced in the same ways graphics first were.

To this day though I can still remember the first time I fired up Quake 2 with my canopus pure3d card (voodoo1). If Ageia (and more importantly the developers) can manage in some way to reproduce that feeling, they will have my money atleast.

I think what they should go for is the alternate renderer approach like quake2 did back then. You have one path that's software based, and another that's hardware based. The software does what it can get away with based on cpu power, but with the hardware turned on you get a whole other realm of interaction. Maybe that's just too hard to program, I don't know. But if they want our money that's what it'll take. If it's not this year or the next, it'll happen sometime... that much is clear. All I know is I can't live with half-assed physics for much longer before I'll get bored with PC gaming and go where it's still exciting.

I don't know about anybody else but things looking really pretty only goes so far. It's what you can do to it and with it that matters.