BFG and its new product

[dunicraig]

i was on BFG's website and there is a revolution in PC gaming coming March 2006. It talks about how first was the CPU, then the GPU, now something else is coming. What is this new thing?

[Amd_Lover2004]

Physix Processors?

I remember hearing about them a while ago, havent heard much since....

[wayout44]

You may not of heard much of late because the hardware has been waiting for more games support to be available for it before release but sometime later this year is its expected debut.

[matm347]

Yes, it's the Physics processor company which joined with BFG last year. From what I've heard there are plans to incorporate physics processing into the GPUs so I wouldn't suggest buying stock in the separate cards.

[Munkul]

correct me if im truely wrong, but physics are already handled by the card, arnt they?

when (or IF) they come out they should allow you to get a few more years out of your old computer.

[matm347]

I believe any physics in current games are handled by the CPU, but the physics engine is supposed to be vastly better than anything we have seen to date, things like tearing down entire buildings with a few thousand rounds of a .50 cal, or ~50 shots with a tank.

[Yawgm0th]

Originally Posted by Munkul

correct me if im truely wrong, but physics are already handled by the card, arnt they?

when (or IF) they come out they should allow you to get a few more years out of your old computer.

Nope. Until recently, the CPU handled all phyiscs calculations. Now, nVidia and ATI are getting developers to design the games so physics can be offloaded to the video card. There is also a company the has designed a PCI card that will perform physics calculations for games that meet a certain standard. IMO, howver, all of this is unecessary. For years now, video cards have been holding back games much more than CPUs. Having the GPU perform physics calculations won't help anything if you're GPU-limited. An entirely separate processor on the GPU does make sense (and IIRC that is how it's being implemented, at least in this case), but it's still unecessary. We're getting right into new generations of AMD and Intel and CPUs are already overpowered in games, so I really think the whole idea of separate physics processors is going to flop, at least to start with. It makes so much more sense to just enable SMP so you can have an entire core dedicated to phyiscs processing, if that's what you need.

[Amd_Lover2004]

I wonder if you can overclock them :)