From The TechReport
During Nvidia's fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Nvidia shed a little more light on its acquisition of Ageia and what it plans to do with the firm's PhysX technology. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made no announcements regarding the deal until asked in the question-and-answer session, but he was happy to divulge a decent number of details.
Huang revealed that Nvidia's strategy is to take the PhysX engine and port it onto CUDA. For those not in the know, CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and it's a C-like application programming interface Nvidia developed to let programmers write general-purpose applications that can run on GPUs. All of Nvidia's existing GeForce 8 graphics processors already support CUDA, and Huang confirmed that the cards will be able to run PhysX.
We're working toward the physics-engine-to-CUDA port as we speak. And we intend to throw a lot of resources at it. You know, I wouldn't be surprised if it helps our GPU sales even in advance of [the port's completion]. The reason is, [it's] just gonna be a software download. Every single GPU that is CUDA-enabled will be able to run the physics engine when it comes. . . . Every one of our GeForce 8-series GPUs runs CUDA.
Huang thinks the integration will encourage people to spend more on graphics processing hardware, as well:
Our expectation is that this is gonna encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might—and probably will—encourage people to buy a second GPU for their SLI slot. And for the highest-end gamer, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs. Potentially two for graphics and one for physics, or one for graphics and two for physics.
Last, but not least, Huang said developers are "really excited" about the PhysX-to-CUDA port. "Finally they're able to get a physics engine accelerated into a very large population of gamers," he explained. Huang was unwilling to get into a time frame for the release of the first PhysX port. However, considering this will be purely a software implementation and Nvidia now has Ageia engineers on its payroll, the port may not take too long to complete.
GeForce 8 cards to gain PhysX support via software dowload
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DW_ChocoCake
- DW Clan Member
- Posts: 87
- Joined: Sun Jul 22, 2007 11:00 pm
Whell I suppose we now know why there hasn't been a large Nvidia driver update since last year. While ATI has had two major patch releases recently, Nvidia has had none, but hopefully their next patch release will have PhysX support.
This is awesome news. The physx graphics if there was a patch for cod 4 would make the car explosions and grenade fragmentations so much cooler!
I really don't know why so many people have problems with their graphics drivers. I have never had a single issue with either my previous ATI drivers or my current nvidia geforce drivers that a simple update didn't fix. Maybe if you didn't go onto p2p apps and steal half of the applications you run on your computer you wouldn't have all these issues :blackeye: lol
Seriously though - what's always causing issues for everyone!
I really don't know why so many people have problems with their graphics drivers. I have never had a single issue with either my previous ATI drivers or my current nvidia geforce drivers that a simple update didn't fix. Maybe if you didn't go onto p2p apps and steal half of the applications you run on your computer you wouldn't have all these issues :blackeye: lol
Seriously though - what's always causing issues for everyone!
Cheers, Damnidge
There is a problem with the 8800 series and textures. Me, Karma, and Cheap can see it happen on maybe 1 or 2 maps, and your framerates drop dramatically. I don't exactly know what the problem is, perhaps after X number of textures it happens or what, anyhow, it was promised to be fixed about 2 months ago, still not fixed.
This is the latest I've heard on the physics for 8800 and 9800 cards. Its coming along faster than expected from what I read. Seems to be faster than the physix card itself in one demo.
quote from the article near the bottom
"There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia's own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card."
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/14/ ... ing_almost_/
quote from the article near the bottom
"There was also a demonstration of cloth: A quad-core Intel Core 2 Extreme processor was working in 12 fps, while a GeForce 8800 GTS board resulted came in at 200 fps. Former Ageia employees did not compare it to Ageia's own PhysX card, but if we remember correctly, that demo ran at 150-180 fps on an Ageia card."
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/14/ ... ing_almost_/
Wow thats good news, hopefuly that will give game houses the nudge they needed to really start embracing this new technology.
Aih PittaH TeH F00l !!!1!11
If you get the GeForce version 177.83 drivers, you get the physics stuff so your series 8 and higher video card will have on-board physics on it now. When you download it, you can choose from several demo's as well as the folding@home GPU thing to fight cancer. I just downloaded the driver and folding@home.
One last thing, you can get the full version of Warmonger which is a physix game that can be played on or off-line.
I intend to install the drivers this evening, mainly so I can do folding@home once in awhile.
(Dont run the folding@home when playing games etc. )
One last thing, you can get the full version of Warmonger which is a physix game that can be played on or off-line.
I intend to install the drivers this evening, mainly so I can do folding@home once in awhile.
(Dont run the folding@home when playing games etc. )