[ODE] re: hw

[Billy Zelsnack]

>> There is also a paper coming in
>> Siggraph 2003 about sparse solvers, which are even more interesting.
>> So
>> clearly, it is not neccesary to create yet another piece of specialized
>> hardware for the PC -- with GPUs you already have/will have powerful,
>> general purpose floating point vector processors.

>I think it depends on the cost/performance ratio(and silicon is cheap).
>For example, most folks find it worth adding 10% to the cost of their
>PC to have 1000x the graphics performance (the primary use of which is
>games). I suspect the same will be true of dynamics performance. For
>example, this paper:
>http://web.informatik.uni-bonn.de/II/ag-klein/people/zach/papers/
>wscg.html
>describes a first generation collision detection hardware that appears
>to be 10-200x faster than CPU based approaches. I suspect the
>in-quantity cost will be much less that of graphics hw, which is now in
>the $50/PC range for (I'm guessing) >1000x CPU performance.

I doubt it will happen. Games are the only thing that drives these types of
markets. 1Ghz of cpu power dedicated to physics is plenty of power for most
anything you would want to do in a game for today. By the time game
developers figure out how to use that up, there will be 3Ghz of cpu laying
around idling.

-billy