Is the World Ready for Physics Acceleration?
At the Game Developers Conference this year, a start-up company with $38 million in venture capital launched a new physics-acceleration chip for PCs (and presumably, future console systems). The company is called Ageia, and the chip is called PhysX. It may end up as just another footnote in the long list of failed PC inventions that didn’t go anywhere, or perhaps it will be the next ubiquitous piece of PC hardware, analogous to 3D graphics acceleration.
The chip itself is impressive: 125 million transistors on a 130nm manufacturing process, capable of some pretty extreme physics number crunching. Normal games can handle the physics and collision detection for maybe 200 or so rigid bodies, while this chip can handle some 32,000. Fluid dynamics get a similar double-order-of-magnitude performance boost, as the chip can calculate some 40,000 to 50,000 particles for fluid dynamics.
We met with the company at GDC in hopes of seeing the chip in action—development boards that plug into either PCI or x1 PCIe slots have already been shown, after all. But in a spectacular display of “how not to build hype about your product,” Ageia told us they were only showing the working hardware to developers—not journalists. So, unfortunately, I can’t say at this point what exactly this kind of physics power will do for games. The company also wouldn’t tell us anything about the microarchitecture, the potential price of the cards (which currently use 128MB of fast GDDR3 memory), or what titles will support it.