AGEIA ?!?
"Physics is cool. Simulations that use physics are cool. People like cool." Thus I imagine is how the AGEIA PhysX dedicated processor was born those years past. The thought natch was that you could add a card to your computer and give players a boost to physics processing for games much like Voodoo did when they made the world 3d. Good idea, I guess. They missed a few things like the explosive growth of computational power on graphics cards and multi-threaded, Moore's law powered, CPUs. You've all heard about how DX10 will enable physics processing on the graphics card right?Well it looks like AGEIA is ready to address this shortcoming and today has released the SDK for free to developers. Imagine all those dev sighs of release. Collectively they might blow out the candle on Sonic's birfday cake.
Hate to break it you boys but do you remember when people actually paid money for sound cards? Like in the eighties or some junk? The problem here ain't the devs, the problem isn't even that its a bad idea or that it isn't implemented particularly well (you know like more frames) the problem is it costs $300 bucks.
6 Comments:
I agree that the AGEIA is way overpriced, but I certainly know that most serious gamers still buy good sound cards because of the huge performance improvement that actual hardware acceleration can provide.
Audigy 2 FTW!
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But it should still be music to your ears, especially considering the recent announcement of their integration with Rad and Granny.
I'm sorry, but what is your point?
Like sound cards, (gigabit) ethernet and generic 3d graphics they're initially overpriced and will eventually end up as just another feature on the checklist of mainboards?
Sounds reasonable enough, if there is any value in the technology. So why be so sceptic?
The problem is that the solution has no real future. A stand alone card offerns no benefits when we already have cards that can and will be doing this in the near future. Not to mention that the ability to thread physics onto a second core of a processor will be readily available in the next year or two as all computers will become multi-core.
Couple this with no real performance gains seen in the games that are using this technology and really very little visual improvement has been reported outside of some textile physics which are indeed visually appealing but still crippling performance wise.
As for granny and rad, it is very unlikely that we will ever be able to use that technology for WWIIOL. We are a PVP game and it is very necessary that players see the same thing. We can use rag doll physics most certainly and the AGEIA physics solution might be a good one to use but a stand alone physics processor that will only show the effects to those people who have the card is a poor choice. By the time they have market penetration that justifies the resources of a small dev house like ourselves there will be options available from other sources that take advantage of hardware that already exists.
This is different than what happened with 3d cards and there can be no doubt that the wide spread adoption of integrated sound cards on mother boards has dramatically decreased the number of gamers that use dedicated sound cards.
Maybe I am wrong and if so that would be a great thing. Bigger explosions are cool. Widespread adoption and improvements to the technology would allow us to use it for more shrapnel, and that would be really cool.
I'm sceptic merely because the marketing hype is so overwhelming and it is giving gamers some false sense of future that even the most forgiving reviews do not bear out.
I assume that in addition to the end user marketing that we civilians might see, they also have marketing activity to game makers.
Is that industry-marketing correctly focused on single-player games, and not on PvP games for which minimum-standard-machine design presumably is the norm?
I'd think they'd want to toss a few apologies in the direction of the PvP game companies, for creating expectation-confusion among their customers and thus decreasing the effectiveness of those companies' own messages in regard to expectations and the hardware future.
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