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Valve and Crytek won’t support PhysX any time soon

Michael Brown — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:34:05 -0500

id Software’s John Carmack gave Ageia some physics action—in the form of turbulence—when he told bootdaily.com that he is “…not a believer in dedicated PPUs.” But it looks as though neither Valve nor Crytek—developers of two other important game engines—are prepared to join the PhysX faithful, either.

The limited installed base of PhysX cards is one of the biggest hurdles for Valve. “We all hate cliché’s,” says Valve’s director of marketing, Doug Lombardi, “but it’s the chicken-or-the-egg problem. The current designs for a PPU (physics-processing unit) offer some advantages in what can be achieved technically. But there’s a bigger question mark with respect to adoption rate, and that has a real-world impact on how many games support them.”

Asus and BFG are the only hardware manufacuters offering PhysX cards today.

Crytek’s Cevat Yerli, executive producer and director of Crysis, points out another problem with supporting a physics processor: The need to create a gaming experience that’s different enough from what’s possible on mainstream hardware to justify the gamer’s investment in the hardware without making an entirely different game for the majority of gamers who don’t have the hardware.

In an interview with Maximum PC’s editor-in-chief Will Smith, for an October issue cover story, Yerli says “We are not supporting GPU or dedicated physics processors for a variety of reasons. The main one is that we did not want to change the core gameplay physics for our min-spec configurations. We have been optimizing our dynamics code for many years now, so it can run robust and as optimally as it can on CPUs of previous generations while also taking advantage of newer multi-core architectures. So you are best equipped with a quad core—if you have the budget—but Crysis will do great on dual-core configurations as well.”

Ageia’s executives, meanwhile, argue that the best hardware for accelerating physics is a processor specifically designed for that application. As Ageia’s vice president of marketing, Michael Steele, puts it: “A truly large-scale physics solution that enables developers to add lots of physically simulated primitives into their games requires hardware that is massively multi-core—we’re talking tens to hundreds of cores. It takes high amounts of floating-point throughput, on par with the [IBM/Sony/Toshiba] Cell processor. It takes highly independent processing to handle the irregular nature of physics—GPUs don’t have this. And it takes high amounts of memory bandwidth—CPUs don’t have this.”

CPU cores have been designed to each execute single-thread programs as fast as possible, and their cache systems are optimized for such operations. The AGEIA PhysX processor has been designed to optimize the execution of many parallel threads of mixed integer and floating-point operations with high entropy data access. On so many dimensions, multi-core CPUs fall short.”

Valve’s Lombardi doesn’t necessarily disagree with Steel’s views, allowing that “…the current designs for a PPU offer some advantages in what can be achieved technically.” And as he points out, physics helped move lot of copies of Half-Life 2. “Players told us with their dollars that this was an important move forward,” says Lombardi. “Subsequently, we’re investing to expand the physics simulation systems of the Source engine and are always evaluating the scope of hardware that will best bring these experiences to life.”

But we gather that PhysX won’t be within that scope in the near future, because as Lombardi points out, other alternatives—primarily multi-core CPUs—already enjoy more market- and mindshare: “When the GPU was the big new idea, it just wasn’t possible to achieve what Mr. Carmack did with GL Quake and what others were doing to pioneer advanced graphics via any of the existing pieces of the PC of that era,” says Lombardi. “Physics routines such as those in Half-Life 2 were achieved in 2004 on millions of non-PPU enabled PCs. Today, multi-core CPUs are opening the door for advanced AI, advanced physics, wildly faster performance, and more—and it’s shipping in just about every new PC being made.”

Does this lack of key developer support spell doom for Ageia? Not necessarily. After all, they still have Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 in their corner. All they need now is that one killer app that will make everyone a believer. As Lombardi puts it “It’s going to require something truly wicked that’s only possible on a PPU to move customers and developers to it.”

GRAW2 Could Rekindle My Enthusiasm for Ageia's PhysX

Michael Brown — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 19:00:19 -0500

I’ve been a relatively harsh critic of Ageia and its PhysX technology; not because I don’t believe in the concept of hardware-accelerated physics, but because I think Ageia has done a poor job of making a case for its own product. But a hands-on demo of Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 at this weekend’s Showdown LAN 2007 has rekindled my interest.

I found the recent CellFactor: Revolution demo to be a major disappointment because it didn’t offer a compelling reason as to why you should buy one of these cards. Redirecting lava flows to turn my enemies into crispy critters with my character’s “psi power” was fun, but the graphics were pedestrian at best—and the gameplay was utterly banal. GRAW2 is a different matter. Ageia tells me all the physics in the game were created using its PhysX SDK, but only one level (dubbed Ageia Island, appropriately enough) requires a PhysX card—you can’t unlock the level without it. Could this be just a marketing ploy? I guess it’s possible, but I’ve never seen such detailed physics in a game.

My impressions are based a brief demo with pre-release code in Ageia’s booth, but this is the clearly the direction in which Ageia needs to move. Nearly everything in the game environment is destructible, and objects exhibit realistic properties. If the enemy catches you hiding behind a wooden fence, for instance, they can plink away at the boards until your cover is completely destroyed. The guard tower is even more remarkable. You can act with stealth and take out the enemy soldier with a sniper rifle, or you can launch an RPG, blow the entire structure apart, and watch him tumble down to his death. The first time you try this, you’ll undoubtedly get blown away yourself because you’re too busy watching the destruction unfold before you.

The effects are persistent, too. Blow up a hut or take down a tower, and the debris will be there every time you return to that spot in the game. This should help keep the game fresh and new, especially during multiplayer bouts. And as odd as it might sound, the weather effects in GRAW2 are almost as impressive as the explosions. The wind blows so many leaves and other debris around the environment that it sometimes obscure your vision. These are the types of particle effects that I’ve been waiting to see move from Ageia’s lab demos to real-world games.

I want to see hardware-accelerated physics thrive, and I think a dedicated processor is the way to do it. While one level in one game isn’t going to sell the thousands of PhysX cards Ageia needs to move in order to attain critical mass, GRAW2 looks like it will be a crucial step in the right direction. The PC version of the game is scheduled for a July 2007 release.

Here are some screenshots showing the watchtower being demolished.

Asus PhysX P1/128MB

Michael Brown — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:03:18 -0500

In religious circles, some worshipers kiss poisonous snakes to demonstrate their faith in God: “The Lord will protect me.” In retail circles, some consumers buy largely unproven products that establish a wholly new market category to demonstrate their faith in technology: “This good idea will benefit me.”

And when it comes to Ageia’s PhysX physics-processing unit, there hasn’t been a product launch that has required such a leap of faith since 3dfx unveiled its Voodoo Graphics chipset back in 1996. Does Ageia’s good idea justify that degree of trust? We spent some quality time with Asus’ implementation of the PhysX board to find out.

Anyone who’s played Half-Life 2—and that’s anyone who’s the least bit interested in computer games—knows how much fun a good physics engine can add to a game. But limited processor power constrained the degree to which you could interact with that game’s environment. Some objects could be shoved around, a few could be blown up, but the vast majority of the environment remained static and unresponsive to your actions in the game.

Ageia has been telling us for months that its PhysX physics-processing unit (PPU), the silicon that forms the heart of this new Asus card, has the power to render just about everything in a game environment interactive. And with a die size of 182 square millimeters, a transistor count of 125 million, and 128MB of DDR memory on board, the hardware is definitely there.

What’s not there—at least not now—is a comprehensive collection of games to tap the hardware’s power. Yes, it’s that old chicken-or-the-egg conundrum: There’s little reason to buy new hardware if there’s no software to take advantage of it, but developers are loathe to create software for hardware that doesn’t have an installed base. Consumers aren’t the only ones asked to make leaps of faith.

We’ll return to the software question in a moment, but allow us to address another issue first: In some machines, installing a PhysX card will mean giving up your soundcard. The card plugs into a PCI slot, just like a Sound Blaster X-Fi card, but in our test bed (an Asus A8N-32 SLI Deluxe motherboard with two dual-slot GeForce 7900 GTX videocards), there’s only one exposed PCI slot. Goodbye, X-Fi.

Now, let’s get back to the software. We’ve been impressed by Ageia’s demos. The Cell Factor demo demonstrates the PhysX chip’s potential, but the game is so far from real that no one’s signed up to publish it. Ignoring that minor detail, nearly everything in the game’s environment is destructible; you can even manipulate pieces of objects you’ve already blown apart. And you need to be careful, lest a chunk of flying debris land on your head and kill you. This kept us entertained for about 10 minutes. Next?

We temporarily uninstalled the card and eagerly downloaded the demo version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (the full game is bundled with the card), one of the first titles to support the PhysX chip out of the gate. We shot all our teammates and they realistically crumpled to the ground. When we shot their bodies to see what would happen, nothing did. We looked forward to installing the PhysX card and seeing the corpses blown into gibs of red goo; you know, like they did in Ageia’s demos.

We shot up a car and watched sparks fly. We looked forward to installing the PhysX card and seeing bullet holes appear in the sheet metal; you know, like they did in Ageia’s demos. We then lobbed a grenade at a car. Its windows disappeared, one of its doors flew open, and the tires fell off. We looked forward to installing the PhysX card and watching the car lift into the air from the force of the detonation, its windows and doors blasted into different sized bits, littering the ground and remaining persistent in the scene. Maybe the roof would blow off; you know, like objects did in Ageia’s demos.

And then we reluctantly removed our X-Fi card, inserted the Asus PhysX card, relaunched Advanced Warfighter, and proceeded to execute our hapless teammates. They realistically crumpled to the ground, just like before, but there was no reaction whatsoever when we shot their bodies. The presence of the PhysX card had no impact at all. So we proceeded to vandalize the car again. This time, we watched two colors of sparks fly. OK, at least that was different. Surely chucking the grenade into the car would deliver the money shot. The car rose up about an inch, its windows shattered, one door blew open, the tires fell off, and a few chunks of debris littered the ground and rapidly disappeared. The force of the blast also bent over a light post. $300 for that?

Is this Ageia’s fault, for over-hyping its product? Or is it the game developers’ fault, for not utilizing the PhysX chip’s true power? The answer is, it doesn’t matter. Based on what we’ve seen so far, we can’t recommend that anyone—no matter how much an enthusiast they might be—spend $300 and possibly give up their soundcard to buy this product. Ageia and its game-developer partners first need to bridge a yawning chasm between hype and reality. We’re willing to evangelize the concept of physics acceleration, but it’s too early to anoint any prophets.

Month Reviewed: July 2006

+ MONEY SHOT: Includes full version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

- CHEAP SHOT: Too few games support the PhysX chip today; those that do don't take good advantage of it.

VERDICT: 6

URL: www.asus.com