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Geek Culture / Nvidia to offer PhysX as a download on Geforce 8800 gpus

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Wilf
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Posted: 14th Feb 2008 19:39
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14147

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.

Quote: "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."


Wow.
Samoz83
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Posted: 14th Feb 2008 19:40 Edited at: 14th Feb 2008 19:41
cool, would you need sli?

www.firelightstudio.co.uk
BatVink
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Posted: 14th Feb 2008 20:18
Quote: "cool, would you need sli?"

It's software.
Samoz83
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Posted: 14th Feb 2008 22:29 Edited at: 14th Feb 2008 22:30
yer but i was reading somewhere people setting it to one of thier sli'd cards, so i just assumed you needed sli

www.firelightstudio.co.uk
BatVink
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Posted: 15th Feb 2008 00:19
That would be if you wanted to dedicate a card to just Physics. The NVIDIA guy suggests this is possible And at £20 for a cheap 8-series card, it beats the £150+ for a PhysX only card.
Kevin Picone
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Posted: 15th Feb 2008 01:01
David R
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Posted: 15th Feb 2008 01:25 Edited at: 15th Feb 2008 01:26
Yeah, surely having a GPU do the Graphics + Physics is just as bad as having the CPU do other stuff + Physics? The whole point of having a separate unit is to make it fast and dedicated... and that's somewhat destroyed if the GPU has to perform two tasks at once in my opinion


09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0
bitJericho
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Posted: 15th Feb 2008 03:23
Quote: "Yeah, surely having a GPU do the Graphics + Physics is just as bad as having the CPU do other stuff + Physics? The whole point of having a separate unit is to make it fast and dedicated... and that's somewhat destroyed if the GPU has to perform two tasks at once in my opinion"


Wouldn't be an issue with sli, since you could potentially dedicate a card to the task, or use whatever power is left over to help render the scene.

In reality it's more efficient use of the card's power. For games that don't offer physx, you could potentially still use the graphics card for simply rendering the scene, instead of having it sit idle.


Hurray for teh logd!
BatVink
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Posted: 15th Feb 2008 08:54
I think that these days the GPU is more than capable of doing a whole lot more. The bottleneck is the comms between card and CPU, so running an application on-board is a smart way to get more out of it.

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