Date:
Monday , March 20, 2006
Author:
Brent Justice
Editor:
Kyle Bennett
Google +1

NVIDIA SLI Physics Tech Preview

Today NVIDIA is announcing some very exciting technology for gamers that is poised to improve your gaming experience in a very real way. Our preview of the technology will tell you what you need to know from the gamer’s perspective.

continued...

Our Thoughts:

This is just a simple technology preview. Unfortunately we have no physical demonstration we can test at this time. We are very excited however of the potential here. We really haven’t seen a big revolution in games in quite some time. I think the last time was when games started supporting 3D graphics accelerators, and we are still building on that today. Every six months to a year we receive GPU improvements that improve our gameplay experience. The next logical step is physics.

If done right, physics will be that next revolution in the gaming experience. It has to be easy though. Easy enough for gamers to grab hold of and enjoy. It also has to be affordable and most importantly gain widespread acceptance. That last part will be the trickiest. Many different types of technologies try and fail to gain widespread acceptance. Remember 3D glasses? What is going to have to happen is that we are going to need big game titles to use physics acceleration and use it in a way that improves upon gameplay like we have never seen before. As gamers we need to see real tangible reasons to upgrade to this technology.

Thankfully out of all the methods we’ve heard about so far it seems using GPUs as dedicated physics processors will be the smartest way to gain this acceptance. The install base is already there. Havok FX can utilize a single GPU or with NVIDIA’s SLI open up even new possibilities. Imagine if you will QuadSLI; two GPUs doing 3D rendering and two GPUs doing all physics. What an immense amount of processing power! It will all be up to the game content developers to show us what they can do in games with that kind of power. We need to see compelling reasons to want this technology. So far we haven’t. It looks like 2006 may be the kick start, a sort of revving up on the physics side of things and by the time we hit 2007 physics may just be the next “3D.”

We should see the first titles using Havok FX to natively support NVIDIA GPUs as physics accelerators toward the end of this year.

What is most interesting is that we have Ageia to thank for this gaming physics awakening. But Ageia have also awoken the sleeping giants, ATI and NVIDIA in terms of physics. From what we have seen, both Red and Green teams look to be better poised to truly ignite a new world of in-game physics that will benefit gamers. It may be Ageia’s party, but I am not so sure they are going to get the last dance.