Support in Games: Is It a Bottleneck?

Despite all its great features the physics accelerator is absolutely useless for the end-user if the games do not support it. What does the situation look like so far for AGEIA?

At this time there are 6 games that support the new AGEIA physics PPU: Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends, Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport, Cell Factor, Gunship Apocalypse and City of Villains. In the nearest future this list should grow up to 20 titles including a very impatiently awaited Unreal Tournament 2007. As a result, the longer list of games will include:

• Unreal Tournament 2007
• Sacred II
• Loki
• Dogtag
• Fallen Earth
• Crazy Machines 2
• Arena Online
• Infernal
• Warhammer MMORPG
• Eye of the Storm
• KARMA
• Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
• Alpha Prime
• Abyss Lights: Frozen Systems

This is a relatively modest list compared with the overall number of contemporary games out there. But if AGEIA manages to win the developers’ hearts with these few titles, then this list will inevitably grow bigger very soon. The company does everything they can to achieve this goal: they provide the corresponding API/SDR – the physical engine that used to be known as NovodeX. It features native PhysX support and is intended for developing games with advanced physical model for PC platforms as well as for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 gaming consoles.

In any case, the idea of an individual processor allocated to calculate gaming physics will live, evolve and spread independent of the hardware implementation in the form of a special chip or an extra add-on card performing the PPU functions in the system. The reasons for our optimism are very clear: it is impossible to get to the next stage of gaming realism without improving the behavior of the game objects. Moreover, special devices cam usually offer the developers more power than the general-purpose computational devices such as system CPUs.

According to the unofficial data we have at our disposal, AGEIA PhysX processes physics 200 times faster than a contemporary system CPU. However, the computational monster, ATI Radeon X1900 XTX, boasts even higher computational potential, although just in theory.

But let’s take a closer look at the actual living being from AGEIA. Please welcome ASUS PhysX P1.