Physics in the digital chasm

Kevin — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 00:53:08 +0000

Physics for the PC were a dream for many gamers. Because it would seem that intense graphics, bleeding sound, and wall sized monitors just don’t add up to much after seeing that demon grab his side and disappear or walk over to a table fill it full of lead or kick it over and all the items either stay as if glued to the surface or disappear into digital nothing, it became a major drawback.The years passed and PC’s (like a kid friend) grew up along with many of us and a turning point happened, On November 16, 2004 Half life-2 stepped up to the plate and made a pitch that actually wreaked chaos on all the items on our full imaginations. What made that possible was a heavily modified physics engine API made by an Irish based company by the name of Havok. It made possible dynamically rigid ragdolls, real-time collisions along with some other functions we won’t go into here. Since its launch it has been in over 150 games and worked on just about everything.

Right, so everyone gets a taste of physics and things are positioned to move forward. On September 14, 2007 Intel buys out Havok and it goes on to earn an award for advancement in the physics field from National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS). Later on Ageia a fabless semiconductor company produced its own SDK called PhysX and a Physics Processing Unit(PPU) made to take the work load off of CPU’s while gaming and was the first to do so. It was a lofty idea by Ageia to introduce a complete expansion card to hold this chip and it met a market with closed arms. Later we would recognize a similar idea by Nvidia with their dual-GPU standard SLI setup and AMD (ATI) with Crossfire that set better in the market with the options and power it offered.

Now with Nvidia and ATI having been introduced this is where the situation for gamers becomes quite the debauchery. You see Nvidia bought out Ageia in February 4, 2008 and by the 13th it was a sealed deal and become known as Nvidia PhysX later converted into CUDA. Meanwhile ATI has not talked much about what their plan is to handle this physics demand. ATI Needing to find an answer to this question and on June 12, 2008 the announcement was made that they are going to use Havok which means they are licensing from Intel, wow right. ATI goes on to say they went this rout because of their open approach strategy and that Havok supports this and in that its independent from Intel to follow up its integrity with such a strategy along side coding it in a OpenCL standard so others could implement without royalty concerns and cross-platform assurance. It would seem that all the cards are on the table and let the market decide the future.

But appearances often are deceiving and around July 9th 2008 a team of developers at NGOHQ.com decided to test the waters and make CUDA work on AMD (ATI). Nvidia either out of spite for Havok or just seeing their API work on a competitors product officially made a claim of wanting to support this move. Well AMD as stated does not agree on the business flow of CUDA and its closed standards so they made it clear that this type of support would not be given their grace. Its now 2010 and the future is looking quite gray at the moment for gamers. Nvidia deciding to make the first gray area with the release of Nvidia’s 186+ any Ageia PPU card or Nvidia GPU to run PhysX will disable itself if the drivers detect any other GPU’s running along side it citing “Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons – some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-NVIDIA GPUs.”

There you have it, division in what many would say should be a diverse and open platform that is the PC. Since then its been a constant arrangement of AMD talking about what vibe they are getting from Nvidia with this caustic move towards their product. A lot of exchanges of who is doing what and how to whom and what used to be. While gamers have had to settle with a huge black line down performance issues with games like Batman:AA not being able to duplicate the same experience between Nvidia and ATI GPU’s. Following comments on the subject matter has shown this division to be quite relevant and that Nvidia going after customers who enjoy and understand diversity are not helping the next link in gaming.

Farther down the rabbit hole leads us to March/8th/2010 where AMD announces a new way of doing physics simulations partnering with Pixelux Entertainment Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) and Bullet Physics . What happened to Havok? I guess it really does not matter because this new playground of tools are OpenCL with no DMM license fee for development or production deployment and includes all the features of the premium version including GPU acceleration. On AMD platforms specifically this tech is driven by ATI’s Stream Technology and that about wraps up AMD’s strategy so far, we can hope.

So the words exchanged in news articles around the Internet between AMD and Nvidia have been opening the gray rift as mentioned before to an absurd chasm that leaves truly passionate gamers on the sidelines in permanent limbo and frustration about these game enhancements and where their components are or are not going to meet in the next greatest game. Open Standards are a passionate persons best friend because as with open standards comes principle with principle comes an even flow of choices for gamers everywhere.

Webisode

kevink — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:48:18 +0000

SO this is the first episode…. of what should be an on going thing I would like to imagine. Ta-da, Speak Geek Webisode. Things are going slow IMHO but I guess that’s how it works in the biz world or in Dallas anyway..this place is something else.

Launch

kevink — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:22:37 +0000

Hello,
Speak Geek is at launch…finally, its been an interesting and time consuming object to make happen. The adventure has really just started because now we can expand ourselves in the best interest of you our customers and probably a few family and friends.

When it comes to your PC’s we want to give you what we strive everyday to give ourselves and hopefully thats a friendly PC experience. So the site will expand and things will get better and more challenging so here’s a cheer to a long and distant future with you our customers, family’s and friends..