Maxit Mag - We want physics in our games!

Written by John M

Not dead yet, but almost.

Last year, all the talk was about Ageia and their PhysX hardware. It looked like, with such a partner as Asus, they were the future of gaming. Right now, with all game titles ready for the holiday season, only Unreal Tournament 3 is scheduled to bring support for the PPU. Agreed, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter also makes use of PhysX, but only to provide some eye-candy (primarily, extra debris).

Not having games is one of the bad things Ageia has to face, but not the only one. The option to calculate physics on GPUs through software is there since Q2 of 2006 with Havok FX. No game use it but the problem is that nobody knows which way of bringing physics to games will eventually succeed.

So many delays will probably end up leaving everything more or less as it was two years ago: with the CPU in charge of the physics calculations. As more cores are added to CPUs, it's FPU weakness will be less evident, and the need for a dedicated piece of hardaware (or an engine that offloads the task to the GPU) will dissappear. More details at Anandtech.

In the meantime, hardcore gamers who bought a PhysX card are left without the possibility to experience true interactivity in their games. Shame on the developers!

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