There is one piece of gaming hardware that not many gamers know about
Hello good people,
today I want to talk about a topic that is pretty unknown among gamers. Most of you know what a GPU (graphics card) is. Also most of you know what a CPU (processor) is. But some of u might have never heard of a PPU (Physics Processing Unit).
What is a PPU? What is the history of the PPUs? Why should a gamer care? Why aren't there any PPUs on the market and what has this to do with our "beloved" green team (aka nvidia)? These are some of the questions I would like to answer in this post.
Image Source: here
What is a PPU?
The architecture of a PPU is very similar to the one of a GPU. You have many smaller cores that are work best if they compute independent tasks. They are tuned for mathematical operation that are often used for the computing of physical problems like, particle systems, gravity, collision responses and so on. This here is an image of the first PPU:
Image Source: here
What is the history of the PPUs?
Well the first PPU was developed by some startups from several universities. And the first PPU was released by Ageia in 2006 and is the one that you see in the image above. Just 2 years later Nvidia bought Ageia including their physics engine PhyX. (First hint what this all has to do with the green team).Why should a gamer care?
The answer is quite simple. A PPU can accelerate the performance by a lot and at the same time increase the visuals. The best example I can give you is the witcher 3.
Image Source: here
The hairworks, the physics of Gerald's hair, can be computed on a PPU. The impact of a PPU can easily be shown if you turn off hairworks. The speedup in FPS is basically what you get if you would apply a PPU to this problem.Why aren't there any PPUs on the market and what has this to do with our "beloved" green team (aka nvidia)?
Well.... there is no PPUs. The only way to get a "PPU" atm is to buy a Nvidia GPU and assign it as a PPU in the Nvidia driver. But and here is the clue.. that only works if the game is supporting Nvidia aka PhysX. And now to the real world. There are not many game that support PhysX. So most people dont' buy a secondary GPU just for a view titles. Even more they are, except for the Witcher 3, not very popular.
And here we come to the sad story. If Nvidia would not have decided to buy Ageia or if they wouldn't have made the whole project an Nvidia only....we (as gamers) could enjoy a third puzzle hardware part in our gaming rigs. A part that would enable us to get better frames and better visuals. But now we have a proprietary physics enigne that isn't often used in games. I know Nvidia is a company and needs to make money. And they don't want anyone to buy AMD graphics cards. But well.. I am pretty sure that there could have been a different business model with more benefit for us gamers. But..as i said...sad story.
What are your opinions? Do you use a PhyX GPU in games? In which? Would you buy a PPU if there would be a broad support in games? Feel free to comment.
I had an old 560ti as a PPU. I liked the physx in Borderlands, but I actually removed the PPU all together as it pretty much stopped being supported. Seemed like a good way to use old GPU's. I wished it was supported by more games.
unfortunately, AMD done it for free, and if you don't have PPU you can use software anyway and processor will run it.. ^_^ its great thing but how many games do use it? 2?
Yeah and the question is why :) Because no software dev will limit his game to one team. Let it be green or red.