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Carmack gives "Kiss of Death" to PPU's
William Henning - Thursday, July 19th, 2007 | 10:27AM (PT)


Aegia will not be pleased.

When speaking to "BootDaily" John Carmack apparently told them that dedicated physics cards don't really add anything to a multi-core system that the CPU's and GPU's can't already do. I wonder if Aegia's stock dropped on this news?

Granted, John wants GPU's to become more general purpose, with finer grained scheduling and context switching, however in the last few years we've definitely observed a trend of increasing GPU processors which are becoming more general purpose with time - witness the 320 stream processors in the 2900XT and the 128 processors in the 8800GTX Ultra.

Apparently Half Life 2: Episode 2 and Crysis will both do advanced physics across CPU cores - which is not surprising, given that it is simply a matter of game houses writing the physics to run as a separate thread (or threads) so they can take advantage of multiple cores.

 

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Comments:

July 19th, 2007 10:30AM(PT)
kspiess
Never really saw the appeal of physics cards.
July 19th, 2007 2:59PM(PT)
Anonymous
I was saying this same thing for almost a year.

It'd be neat to have one...but they don't do much IMO.
July 20th, 2007 10:40AM(PT)
Wolfwood
It would have been better if they counted towards Physics 12 education for post secondary admissions.
July 20th, 2007 11:21AM(PT)
King Alec
Physics cards seemed a bit useless from the start tbh, Havok physics work fine on my single core processor and I can't see much more use than that (Although I'm looking forward to shooting trees apart in Crysis).

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