Physics Processing Units (PPUs) Coming Soon

Physics Processing Units (PPUs) Coming Soon
Posted :: Mar 9, 2005 by Haggs

At the Game Developers Conference this year, a company known as AGEIA presented a product that will likely find its way into computers by the end of the year. AGEIA premiered their PhysX chip which is the first physics processing unit (PPU). The PPU will complement the CPU and GPU to bring gamers (and simulators) a device devoted to the calculation of software physics. The current PhysX PPU, operating at less than 25 Watts, can outperform a CPU in physics based calculations by a significant margin.

AGEIA has completed the chip and card designs and is working to find retailers, and manufacturers for production. AGEIA, much like nVidia, has no plan to produce the actual boards them selves, but rather produce the chips and sell them to the board manufacturers.

The gaming industry has been crying out for better physics for years. The recent release of Half-Life 2 was a big step forward in the way of game physics, but there is still plenty of room for improvement. AGIEA's PhysX PPU is paving the way toward a future when the PPU will be a common component of any gamer's rig. To make the improvement, it is likely that PPUs will become an integral part of the process. Many gamers will be excited to hear that Epic's Unreal 3 is to be fully supported by AGEIA's PhysX.

You can find the demo program from AGEIA here (16MB download). After installing and running the program you can play around with the demos. Some of them require you to interact by right-clicking objects and dragging them or moving around the camera using the left mouse button. I strongly recommend checking out the "deer ragdoll" and "pseudo cloth" parts of the demo program.

More information about the announcement of PPUs can be found at AGEIA, The Inquirer or MegaGames.