It was big news when NVIDIA snatched up AGEIA, but what's happened since? Well, NVIDIA has been busy working to port the PhysX libraries to Cuda, and according to Tom's Hardware, things are coming along nicely.
While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.
Sounds good. Let's just see NVIDIA push for better physics in games than the mere tech demos AGEIA pushed out themselves.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/14/nvidia_gpu_physics_engine_up_and_running_almost_/
While Intel's Nehalem demo had 50,000-60,000 particles and ran at 15-20 fps (without a GPU), the particle demo on a GeForce 9800 card resulted in 300 fps. If the very likely event that Nvidia's next-gen parts (G100: GT100/200) will double their shader units, this number could top 600 fps, meaning that Nehalem at 2.53 GHz is lagging 20-40x behind 2006/2007/2008 high-end GPU hardware. However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.
Sounds good. Let's just see NVIDIA push for better physics in games than the mere tech demos AGEIA pushed out themselves.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/14/nvidia_gpu_physics_engine_up_and_running_almost_/