The PPU is very intriguing to me, but I have to echo the sentiment that I wouldn't pay more than $100 for it as a standalone card or I'd want it on a video card.

I predict failure with these stuff, most people are tired of the overwhelming system requirements each new games requires.

Does anyone have a clue what the price is gonna be on these things? It's only a chip on a board and drivers. More than $50?

Everyone who plans on buying a new multicore CPU ($400+), a new GPU ($400), and a $100 PPU just so they can play "next generation games" on the pc are just proving they have more money, and significantly less common sense. Better off just spending $300 for a Xbox360 or the PS3 and play the game the way ITS MEANT TO BE PLAYED with no performance penalty.

Everyone who spent $500 on their Geforce 6800 a year ago still havent gotten their money's worth. I spent $1500 building myself a high end PC a year ago and I have yet to put the hardware to use. The only games on the pc that actually stands out is Doom3, Half Life2, Far Cry and quite seriously, the selection is limited.

No more wasting money on upgrades. If I'm going to play next generation games, it'll be on the consoles.

I agree with Krogoth255, you can use this technology for other applications than games. Structural engineers could see a massive reduction in calculation times...From weeks, to days, maybe even hours!

Some people here are just plain weird.

The PS3 showed us (if you saw the Sony conference on video) that physics processing is what's gonna bring this awesome fully interactive environment.

You see the technology on a console, but despise to have it on a PC, wtf?

It will give a PC the same kind of full interactive environment in games as seen on PS3, and you don't want this PPU, why?

You're willing to spend ridiculous amounts on a CPU and video card, that doesn't offer that much gain, but you won't want a fully interactive environment where, for the first time, you can move and touch everything in the game?.

Talk about judging a book by its cover! I bet 1000000 to 1, you haven't even seen what a PPU can actually do. In fact, I doubt you know what a PPU actually does!

People predict the failure of PPU...I predict the same fouls who WILL eventually get one themselves!

In fact, I won't be surprised if it actually becomes a standard thing...Maybe integrated on a video card? (separate chip onboard)

Buying Game Specific Hardware is F'ing retarded. We already have standards like DirectX and OpenGL, which are handled and obeyed by the top two graphics chip makers. Unless this PhysX thing get's a spot in DirectX, it's going NO WHERE.

Think about it. What's this PPU gonna do for, say, Ghost Recon 3? Are there any parts of Ghost Recon 3 that have thousands of independly moving physical items? No.

What about characters? Well ragdoll is already handled very easily on a single character basis.

And a $300 video card is enough people. Some of you have more money than sense.

Hopefully there will be some sort of a hardware abstraction layer - the software can then work either on eg a second normal CPU, gracefully degrading depending on the CPU power available, or on a PhysX board if present. I think it may need something like this to get widespread adoption of the engine in games?

This is going to be bleeding-edge hardware to be purchased by first adoptors. Who's to say that 3 years down the line they will not have become widely accepted? If it really enhances performance, couldn't ATI or nVidia put it on their high-end video card? PCI x16 bandwidth would certainly allow it.

In general, this talk about the PPU is making me see how programmers are likely to take advantage of the huge CPU parallelism on the XBOX360 and PS3.

Rather than have the actual game logic multithreaded, they will be pushing things like physics processing to the other cores.

By game logic I mean the equivalent to 'business logic', or in other words the custom written code that defines all the entities in the game world, and all the ways in which they interact with one another. The highly parallelized stuff will all be in graphics / physics / 3D sound libraries.

I had always been a little bit doubtful that game programmers would successfully add the enormous complexity of multi-threaded programming into their games, 'just like that'. It seems like they won't have to, which makes it much more likely that the horsepower these consoles bring to the table will actually get used to its full capacity.

I want a duad core quad pumped 33.6 modem. Think of the parallelism!

AGEIA = the next 3dfx, if PPU take off.

Some of you greatly underestimate the potential of PPUs. It's not just for making games more realistic. There are some professional applications that can take advanage of PPUs like CAD, CGI movie rendering, Engineering software and scieniftic programs.

I see AGEIA is still pushing forward to blow all their investors money.

Hopefully the Chapter 7 auction might not make it a total bust.

Eh, don't want one.

I don't see what all of the fuss is about. Most of the physics is just vector processing, which a second core could do on it's own. I don't see this going anywhere. Someone is just trying to invent the next killer app. Until we have vibratosensohearovision, I'm not interested. Just a waste of money. With the new consoles coming out, the only money I'll be spending on my PC is to quiet it, and to get dual core going.

The only way I can see this getting decent acceptance on the PC is if they get together with ATI and Nvidia and integrate it into high end video cards.

Although if it's widely used on the next gen colsoles, that could certainly stir the pot..

I am not sure the naysayers fully understand what this chip does, and its implications for gaming. When it comes out, yeah, you'll want one. Noone bought the vooodoo when it was first announced either, saying it was a gimmick.....until they saw what it did. :)

I'm a bit confused here. If you have a multicore processor, then you don't necessarily need a physics chip, but Novodex software? And if that's the case, would I have to purchase this software or would it be integrated into software of a particular game that uses it? And if that's the case, why couldn't game developers just write their multi-threaded software to do just what they want it to do without using Novodex?

Not convinced, yet.

The thing about gaming consoles is, it seemed to me the whole purpose of the massive multithreading in the Cell processor was so the PS3 could do advanced physics stuff, without even needing a seperate "physics unit" like this. Putting one of these in a PS3 would be redundant, wouldn't it?

Edit: It would appear I'm right, as AEGIA is providing physics-engine software for the PS3, to run on the PS3's own multi-threaded hardware (meaning the Cell processor). So it's not just a sale of physical boards, but also of the software for systems that can do the hardware part itself... interesting. Anyway, link: http://www.ageia.com/pr_05172005b.html