23rd August 2005, 8:01 AM
I just read some more about the PhysX PPU at their website. It's true that games usually only implement basic physics, and usually cheat that to make it faster. This would greatly increase the speed of those calculations and also make it easier to do more complex physics stuff (I don't think that is an issue anyway, but there it is). However, when you start talking about every rain drop being blown around by the wind and breaking apart into smaller droplets when it hits an object, and rocks and metals that have different properties so the shatter or bend, or cars that have realistic damage from crashes, you are talking about ALOT of extra overhead that is not even considered now. For example, so now you have a PPU that does all kind of calculations on the raindrops and the wind, that's great. But now you have to keep track of EVERY SINGLE RAIN DROP in the world and have some way to represent wind. That is a lot of extra work the CPU will have to do that it wasn't doing before. And it will be a pain for developers until they develop new libraries to abstract away a lot of those details. I'm not saying it is unrealistic or that it won't happen- I hope it takes off and I think in time it will. But I don't see it being a next-gen thing. Give it another 5 years.