PhysX’s Big Break? Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Performance
by Ryan Smith on December 14, 2007 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- GPUs
Closing Thoughts
Wrapping things up, we’re reminded again of AGEIA’s prowess at producing technical demos. Like the free CellFactor: Revolution and Warmonger games, these maps serve more as a demo of what developers can do with the PhysX hardware than anything else. But AGEIA is also closer to getting the PhysX PPU used in enough important games that it becomes something more than a piece of tech demo hardware.
The performance improvements offered by the PhysX PPU with AGEIA’s maps are substantial, which is where we would expect them to be, but CTF-Tornado also offers an interesting path for AGEIA to go down that we haven’t seen them go down yet. Out of the PhysX titles we’ve looked at so far, the addition of the PPU either adds performance-harming eye-candy (GRAW), effectively meaningless eye-candy (City of Heroes), or a game uses physics so heavily that it’ll never be a mass-market AAA title because it’s unplayable without the PPU (CellFactor).
We’ve been wondering if and when someone would produce a work using the PPU that showcases the PPU as a way to improve performance without the lack of said PPU killing performance, and we’ve found that work in CTF-Tornado. Perhaps it’s not an otherwise remarkable map, but we think AGEIA would certainly have an easier time selling the PPU if there were more games that could be playable with or without a PPU, while the PPU offered a tangible benefit.
Unreal Tournament 3 as measured by its stock maps however is not that game. There’s an interesting performance boost in what we believe are a fraction of the total maps, but it’s practically academic. The possible performance boost doesn’t occur in enough maps or occur as a big enough boost to clearly justify installing a PhysX PPU; either way the game is going to be completely playable. But it’s a start.
Unfortunately we find ourselves once again sitting on the fence when it comes to deciding if the PhysX PPU is a worthwhile piece of hardware or a dud. AGEIA continues to show us just enough in the way of games and performance that we can’t write it off, but we still don’t have the killer app that justifies the PPU either. It once again boils down to a matter of throwing it a new computer along with the kitchen sink, or playing exactly the right combination of games and enjoying exactly the right combination of eye-candy, that the PPU becomes worth it.
At the very least, AGEIA and its partners have brought down the price on PhysX cards from their heavy introductory prices. At least through the end of the year, AGEIA has BFG selling their PhysX card for $99, making the part a more practical purchase. This doesn’t change our fence-sitting position on the matter, but it does help to keep the PPU viable for now and keeps us from writing it off after so few games in the last year and a half.
Looking forward, it seems like it’s a matter of time however until AGEIA and its partners release a new PhysX PPU and cards based on said PPU. We’ve heard the rumors of a new, far more powerful part in production, and we know from AGEIA’s developer efforts that they intend to stay in the game a while longer yet. Coupled with the interesting situation on CTF-Lighthouse of being PPU limited, a new PhysX PPU seems imminent. When, how much, and how that will go over with still such few PhysX-supporting games out there remains to be seen. Now may not be the best time to throw in the kitchen sink however if AGEIA intends to release a new PhysX product within the next few months.
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SignalPST - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
On a unrelated note, does anyone know if the retail game shipped includes high resolution textures? People were complaining that the demo didn't include it, and the in-game graphics don't compare with anything like those eye-popping screenshots Epic teased us with.cubanx - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
They are included but not the default. If you mess around with the settings you can get quality near the screen shots they released .Here's one tweak guide http://www.tweakguides.com/UT3_1.html">http://www.tweakguides.com/UT3_1.html
Dainas - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
....And yet there still is NO PCIe PhysX card available for purchase.Heres another question for AGEIA; with dwindling PCI classic slots on todays motherboard, how do they expect people to use their products if there's no where to put it?
poohbear - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
i hear u man. i have 1 soundcard and 1 wifi card and my other pci slot is blocked by the aftermarket cooler on my x1900xt, so there's simply no room for this card on pci even if i wanted to buy it.:pgoku - Monday, December 17, 2007 - link
get an ethernet to wifi converter, that way you can use the onboard ethernet on your motherboard.http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Buffalo-Launche...">http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Buff...Launches...
I'm sure there are others on the market as well.. I personally hate wifi and avoid it as much as possible. If I can get a wired connection, I'll use that first, even if it means running a line through the walls 50FT+ in order to get it.
SuperGee - Sunday, December 16, 2007 - link
That's choice there are more add-on's then ATX provide slot's for.This is not Ageia's problem. But more a choice the consumer must make.
Well I have a spare PCI slot next to my PPU. I realy don't have much in it a G-card and a PPU.
If for example choose for triple SLI you made a choice to blow away 3 to 9 slots.
Or must have a prof.RaidContoller and TV-card next to SLI. Then it get crowded with a soundcard..
And it not long ago that the populair sound card manufacturer offer a PCI-E sound card.
Mr Alpha - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
I believe there is a PCIe x1 version of the PhysX card sold to OEMs. There was a story somewhere that said AGEIA was going to release the PhysX PCIe x1 card into retail, but decided not to when it turned out that it wouldn't work on a significant portion of the motherbaords with PCIe x1 slots, because the slots weren't implemented in accordance to PCIe specs. Something about out of spec jitter was mentioned.There is something Anandtech has been missing from their motherboard reviews: Do the PCIe x1 slots actually work?
PandaBear - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
In Today's multi core CPU, unless you need to do physics with say 16 different threads, you would in theory ease 1 core out of all.Say the physics processor can do 1/2 of a CPU core's work (unlikely), then on a single core you gain 50% performance, dual core you gain 1/4, quad core 1/8.
Compare to how much of that work in theory could be done on a GPU (it's just math), and say it has the performance of 4 of the 48 shader's performance, you get 1/12 of a gain in GPU.
Now in practice, splitting work across a slow bus like PCIe, PCI, or HT are going to slow it down even more, with additional I/O work on both ends you are going to gain almost nothing (exactly where it is now).
I think if the market gets big enough, Nvidia or AMD will put one in their GPU, Intel/AMD will 1up each other by putting it in instead of wasting all the die space for cache. A dedicated physics processor on a bus as a card will never make it big.
Spoelie - Friday, December 14, 2007 - link
Your logic is completely flawed, since you do not know anything about the varying workloads, how good each type of chip is at each workload and how the workloads compare relatively.Specifically at physics calculation workloads, a PPU chip is a multitude of times faster than a cpu core. (Note the use of chip and core, since a ppu is more a collection of minicores). What this means is that when you peg one core of your multicore CPU at 100% load with solely physics threads, it is still way slower than a ppu, and thus can not handle the same physics workloads.
The actual performance boost is thus completely dependent on how big a workload the physics part of the application is. And current games do not have a big physics workload, partly because without a ppu the processing power is just not there.