Page 6

The Industry about Physics Acceleration

A quickie Kylotonn interview.

A while ago we spoke with Benoit Treins from Kylotonn studio, easily one of the more interesting titles of the year. I wanted to share with you the developers point of view on Physics solutions like Ageia offers.

Hilbert: Ageia has been developing the PhysX PPU, your title will utilize this new technology. I have to explain this to our audience, Ageia believes that games can be rendered as a far better experience once you will not only calculate pixels but also common real-world physics by a dedicated processor. Bet On Soldier is going to support this new technology, why?

We are using the Novodex engine from Ageia for all the physics of the game. It allows us realistic interactions with the environment. But the PhysX opens a new era for management of physics in game. As it is specialized in processing physics, this chip can let the video card express its full potential for the graphics.

Hilbert: For the consumer this means building a very expensive high-end PC and then having to cough up another 250/300 USD for the PhysX board. Wouldn't it be much more logical if you integrated the PhysX model as a software engine into the game and then let the Physics actually be calculated a the videocard?

Programmers rarely develop for the hardware itself; rather they use an API (Application Programming Interface) with an HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). This is the case for Graphical Hardware (by means of Direct3D and OpenGL), for Sound Hardware (by means of DirectSound and OpenAL) and will be the case for Physical Hardware. The NOVODEX API is developed by AGEIA in conjunction with their PPU (Physical Processing Unit). All that can run on hardware will, the rest will run in software.

Dispatching the workload to the various GPUs is exactly the same as dispatching it to a specialized unit, except that the PPU will run some physics widely-used routines (such as collision detection) purely in hardware (GPUs kind of de-specialized themselves by becoming programmable but still perform a vector dot operation in a single cycle).

The question of data transfer between host CPU and external Processing Units will be a major point in latest architectures, thats for sure.

Hilbert: In the never-ending quest for high-quality rendering versus performance, how much of an advantage is the PhysX PPU going to offer you in terms of framerate and what other key advantages will the PhysX PPU bring to your audience compared to users with a 'normal' gaming rig without the add-on card?

Like users with High-End graphical cards could benefit from advanced eye-candy (soften shadows, high detailed models and textures), PPU users would benefit from advanced realism in terms of clouds, gibs or particles physical behaviours. Likewise, collision detection, which is a major CPU consumer in game engines can be deferred to PPU leaving host processor idle for other duties such as AI calculations (until an AI Processing Unit arises of course) and pure gameplay code, to create more interesting and rich content.

Bet on Soldier is published by Digital Jesters and developed by Kylotonn.