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Future of Physics in Games – AGEIA Speaks

AGEIA’s Chief Executive Interviewed

by Yaroslav Lyssenko

[ 10/10/2005 | 01:38 PM ]

Game performance has always been limited either by Central Processing Unit (CPU) or by add-in graphics card. As games become more and more complicated both CPU and graphics card have to cope with more and more calculations and there are things coming to make the life of a CPU even more hard, for instance, realistic physics and advanced artificial intelligence (AI).

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In order to build a game environment with realistic physics a lot of calculations are required to be performed at the same time. Till now, all physics related calculations were done by microprocessors, but current generation of CPUs does not really seem to be capable of performing much faster than today, something that gamers would demand. Since the role of physics only increases, a separate chip has been designed to handle physics related calculations.

AGEIA is the first company to design and manufacture Physical Processing Unit (PPU). While the card based on the PhysX PPU was showcased some time ago, many details are still unknown about the capabilities of the product. In order to shed some light on this new add-in card OverClocker.cl has interviewed Manju Hegde, CEO of AGEIA.

“The biggest challenge we see is the need to educate game developers widely about the potential of this technology and its use in games. There is a lot of catching up to do with the state of the art movies where literally hundreds of thousands of rigid bodies and millions of particles are shown off in movies such as Lord of the Rings,” states Manju Hegde, CEO of AGEIA.

“Depending upon how the developer designs the physics into the games, there could be competitive advantages. They may have more intelligence during game play. For example in the PhysX enabled PC the player can detect the rustling of the grass and track opponents whereas your opponent who is not PhysX enabled may be crept upon stealthily,” Mr. Hegde believes.