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A new kind of expansion card on the horizon
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)
Posted by: taco_fox
A Physics Processing Unit or PPU. After being entertained quite thoroughly by the Havok physics engine in HL2, this could turn out to be pretty cool if developers support it. The downside is, of course, having another piece of hardware to buy in order to be at the cutting edge of computing.
Here's some articles:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=21648
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/050308/sftu104_1.html
An interview with the people developing it:
http://www.gamers-depot.com/interviews/agiea/001.htm
Posted by: gmackay1
This will really make games look amazing. I'm hoping that NVidia and ATI will incorporate this technology into their cards. I feel the GPU and PPU belong together because graphics and physics is closely related in the design of games. They've been talking about this for a long time at the Game Developers Conference.
For the time being creating a stand alone PPU card is a good way to test the market to see if it catches on. It has to catch on because (like the article says) seeing something blow up into a zillion pieces with each particle having their own lighting and material, etc... is just mind blowing.
Posted by: armystud0911
Wow! More sexy hardware for eager sweaty palmed buyers like me to get their hands on, yay! It also sounds like this could REALLY take a lot of load off of the CPU much like the GPU does. I just hope we are looking at sound card range pricing ($40-$200) instead of Graphics card level pricing ($70-$500) or do I sense a phyics card level pricing ($50-$350) coming on?
On a side note, I will now own an APU, CPU, GPU, PPU and VPU by the end of the year, lets see what other letters they add as a prefix to "Processing Unit" to equal more hardware we need to buy.
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