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For our PhysX review in PCF 188 (on sale this Thursday), Jeremy Laird spoke to Manju Hegde, chairman and CEO of Ageia about his plan for the future. Here's his unexpurgated thoughts...
Intel and AMD. ATI and NVIDIA. All multi-billion dollar companies and household brands for card-carrying geeks across the globe. But it wasn't always so. Take NVIDIA. At the beginning of 1993, the mean green graphics machine was little more than a glint in the eye of Jen-Hsun Huang, one of the graphics outfit's three founding fathers and now its President and CEO. Fast forward thirteen years later and NVIDIA is currently worth nearly $10 billion dollars. That, in our best Quake III voice, is IMPRESSIVE.
And it's exactly the sort of explosive growth that the head honcho of Ageia, the company responsible for the world's first hardware physics accelerator chip, is hoping for. Founded in 2002, Ageia is a classic Silicon Valley start-up and it's just possible that its CEO Manju Hegde could become the next Jen-Hsun Huang. With the unveiling this month of the PhysX card, courtesy of board partners Asus and BFG, Ageia is taking its first crucial steps towards establishing itself in the ruthlessly competitive PC components market. PCF caught up with Manju Hegde just before the launch of PhysX to get the inside story from the man who knows more about Ageia's plans than anyone else.
So, just what does Ageia's unique physics processing chip have to offer and why should PC gaming enthusiasts even consider spending as much as £200 on an essentially unproven product? "PhysX is going to fundamentally change the way games are developed. the real-time 3D rendering capability of the PC has experienced an enormous growth in processing power and fidelity. But in-game physics simulation has fallen woefully behind," Hegde reckons. The implication is obvious: the PhysX chip is hereto close the gap to graphics, to single-handedly lift PC physics into the 21stcentury and enable game developers to create more realistic and immersive games than ever before.
That singular purpose has lead to the creation of the massively parallel array of floating point units that is the PhysX chip. And suffice to say that Hegde is confident that his baby has the measure of competing solutions ¨C think CPUs and GPUs - for processing physics calculations. "Obviously, performance PCs already include a processor with massively parallel floating point capability ¨C the GPU,"Hegde concedes. "But those chips are designed and optimized for graphics instruction sets. Ours is purpose-built to handle physics instructions as efficiently as possible." For the full tech spectacular on why PhysX should spank GPUs for physics number crunching, including details of the PhysX chip's massive internal data bandwidth and specific processing capabilities, check out this month's edition of PCFormat.
But what of CPUs? Needless to say,Hegde emphasizes that a general purpose CPU is never going to be competitive with a chip built from the ground up with just one job in mind. You only need compare the relative performance of a GPU and a CPU in something like Futuremark's 3DMark benchmark utilities to appreciate the massive performance delta a dedicated chip can deliver.
There is, however, one exception: Sony's Cell processor. "There are similarities, at a high level, between our PPU(Physics Processing Unit) and the SPE array in Cell," Hegde says. "Cell is good at processing physics." But don't think that's bad news for Ageia. Quite the contrary. "We're currently working with Sony to optimize our software for the Cell processor," Hegde reveals. In fact, according to Hegde, Sony is preparing to make a big push on the importance of detailed physics simulation for immersive next-generation gaming. In truth, there was relatively little evidence of that strategy at this year's E3 jamboree in LA. But then Sony stood up on stage and both hailed UMD as a smash hit and presented its motion-sensitive controller as a ground-breaking innovation. So, best to focus on what Sony eventually delivers with the PS3, and not the PR spin. Whatever, the implications of an Ageia-Sony joint effort are enticing indeed. And raise the likelihood that some upcoming games ported from the PS3 to the PC will seriously benefit from the presence of a PhysX chip.
So far, the enthusiast community's reception of PhysX has been quietly optimistic, though some doubts have been raised regarding the additional load placed on the GPU by the much increased level of debris that is expected to be part and parcel of many upcoming games that include PhysX support. Both of the high profile supporting titles that have accompanied the launch of PhysX, Ghost Recon Advanced War Fighter and Cell Factor, certainly appear to suffer from some performance issues. Still, with only a handful of supporting titles available at launch and with the chip still in its infancy in terms of driver optimizations, we'll give Ageia the benefit of the doubt regarding performance for now.
However, there is one accusation involving Ageia's approach to implementing PhysX that we would agree with: it's not open enough. Granted, Ageia is providing its own physics engine along with SDK and development tools under a free licensing arrangement. But many would prefer those Ageia opening up their physics API to all and sunder, enabling hardware acceleration for competing physics engines, such as the Havoc engine as used in Half-Life 2. In mitigation, Hegde claims that it's a fairly straight forward task to tweak an existing game to enable PhysX support. However, for now,PhysX will remain a closed shop. "As a new and relatively small company," hesays, "it's simply too expensive and difficult to manage support for multiple thirdparty physics engines. Programming our PhysX chip is not a trivial taskand we need to minimise the support burden as our operations grow."
Just what developers will make of thelack of choice, in terms of compatible physics engines, only time will tell.But there's little doubt that developer support is the key to Ageia's success.Just as with the shiny new consoles shown off in LA. earlier this month, it'ssoftware, not hardware, that will make or break Ageia's PhysX PPU. PCF, Manju Hegdeand the venture capitalists who funded the Ageia's revolutionary new chip,therefore, all anxiously await the arrival of the killer gaming title for PhysX.Watch this space...
http://blog.pcformat.co.uk/page/ ... erview_with_the_ceo |
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