Comments on: Blender and Physical Processing Chips (PPUs)

By: well

well — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 08:40:15 +0000

I doesn't like it anyway. It's like the old MPEG Decoder cards to see DVD on

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 05:23:14 +0000

I am definatley all for the PPU. Have you guys seen some of the demo videos of what that thing is capable of?! It is truely beautiful. I will pour all my money on one of those PPU's,Im that type of gamer that walks around Doom 3 and thinks "if only I had the physics of HL2".
An open API is great, but it will be a long time in the making.

By: hugo

hugo — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 22:52:07 +0000

of course the ppu is programmable. it's just a normal vector processor. they didn't bake a physics engine on a chip. it can only be used with ageia's api though which isn't open. otherwise it could accelerate stuff like nils' fluid simulator (and many other things like raytracing) aswell i guess.

By: etr9j

etr9j — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 01:42:45 +0000

Hype? I thought I was shooting down PPUs. But as far as hype elsewhere, I certainly see it all over other gaming sites and even some sites claiming that it's being used for big fx scenes in movies (though I can't substantiate those claims). I personally am not being drawn into it at all… especially for the ~$200 plus Aegia will be charging for these things.

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 01:34:45 +0000

I think there is too much hype and too little substance in this article and I really don't care. Hardware physics processing is needed for ultra-complex gaming application clients. I don't see that blender has a gaming runtime optimised for the most complex gaming applications though. Instead of thinking about cool harware PCI cards, let's start with the basics: do we want to tune the blender gaming engine for high complex graphics, physics and audio support?

By: Henrymop

Henrymop — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 21:58:38 +0000

@[torc]

Yeah, you're right, and the phyics is Half-Life 2 doesn't take very much processing power, so why only for gaming if it isn't much extra power? I'm guessing it's easier to start on gaming and then more complex apps, even though games are super-complex.

By: [t0rc]

[t0rc] — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:51:15 +0000

PPUs are a tough call. Right now they are aimed towards gaming but I'd be surprised if someone out there wasn't looking into how they can be applied to other fields. Hopefully legal dance won't get in the way of Open Source development with PPUs; I really think with a lot more people out there working on integrating them into a computer and utilizing the additional processing power when you're not playing a game would greatly increase not only the appeal of a PPU but the practicality.

By: Henrymop

Henrymop — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 20:18:56 +0000

Looks like a new gaming fad is on the horizon. It has a good chance of failing, though. And the Havoc engine recently incorperated in Max might get some attention. And gaming componies might take that into concideration.

By: etr9j

etr9j — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 16:36:20 +0000

@well
Personally, I think a more general architecture would cause specific processes to be hurt by it. Already the desktop CPUs are fairly general in their capabilities which limits their power in doing specific tasks (see the Cell processor vs the pentium for graphics)

@eldani3d
That's exactly what is needed. Given the newness of the PPUs I think it might be a while till we see something like this.

By: eldani3d

eldani3d — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 16:22:08 +0000

I dont't know so much about this detailed topic (I'm a beginner in 3D progamming), but why can't we merge what William says ("The ideal for open source apps like Blender is that an open API becomes available and well supported") with the words of etr9j ("Blender’s game engine already has a physics engine abstraction, and this makes it very easy to add another engine like the closed source PhysX system"). That is: why don't we start making an "open API" from what we have now (the "Blender’s game engine physics engine abstraction").?
Sorry if I'm telling something wrong or something VERY VERY complex, but I had this idea while reading this.