The very first Videocard I ever bought was the
Diamond Monster Fusion wayyy back in 1998 (I was in Year 8 at the time!) after almost a year of saving up doing the paper rounds the year before (that was my first ever job, I rode my bike around alot back then so mom decided to get me a job delivering the news-paper in our area, after 8 solid months of doing it quite well, i decided to start "delivering" the bulk of the news papers in some guys bin and bum around for a few hours, I did that two weeks in a row (idiota!), got busted the next week from my parents and got in big trouble!) so anyhow back to the 3D card...
The card was equiped with the latest and (at the time) greatest GPU 3DFX Banshee chipset with a whopping 16Mb of SGRAM on the AGP Bus, it came with Unreal and Motorcross Madness (oh the times!) and for a while there, I was a happy chappy. Then in 2000 in my work-experience joint (Chips n Bits - a wholesaler which no-longer exists) I got to "touch" the very first Voodoo 5 5500 that had arrived to Australia, test it and make sure its all good before it went to APC for review. Man was I up myself!
3DFX started the accelerated graphics generation (unless?) and now AGEIA is taking the next step and starting the Physics Processor add-in card generation with their PhysX PPU core. Essentially this means that like the GPU does the bulk of the graphics rendering code on its dedicated processing unit, the PPU will handle the bulk of the Physics in games/simulations which is currently CPU bound, freeing up your CPU for other tasks.
If you want to take a peek at what this will mean and how its so freaking awesome, take a look at the
PhysX real-time footage and download the two high-definition captures in Quicktime format at the bottom of the page. This may sound marketingish but rich physics in games are finally here!
Now heres comes the problem, AGEIA are making the PhysX PPU as a seperate addin card which board designers like
ASUS can take and build into cards they sell, however
NVIDIA is also working on a similar routine which will make use of the
Havok engine, interesting to see which will endup getting the upper-hand. One thing going for AGEIA is that they have
quite a few titles already making use of the PPU - including
Unreal Tournament 2007 (and that looks saaaaawweeeeeeeeeet *drools*)...
EDIT:
ATI have announced that they've got a better system in place compared to AGEIA and NVIDIA, to quote the main article:
ATI is also saying that its method for processing physics on the GPU is superior to both AGEIA's and NVIDIA's. According to the company, those who have already purchased any one of the X1800 or X1900 series can rest assured that their investment will last. Using its propriety API, ATI is able to offload physics processing to any GPU in a dual-GPU setup, regardless of whether or not the cards are in Crossfire mode or that they are even from the same family. This way, those who upgrade later can use their existing X1800 or X1900 cards for discrete physics processing while using the newer card for 3D acceleration duties. As of right now, ATI's method appears to offer the best combined benefits of both AGEIA's discrete processing as well as being able to switch between Crossfire, Crossfire + Physics.
Looks like things are heating up,
interesting read and times ahead...