[ODE] hardware physics chip

[Vrej Melkonian]

Is there any proof that it's going to be worthwhile?
If it is worthwhile, then Intel, AMD and IBM would
have designed a CPU with some "physics" instructions
by now.
I don't see many people buying an add-on card.

--- Patrick Barnes <mrtrick at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes, it's possible - hardware is almost always
> faster than software.
> 
> Games could benefit from this, but only if they are
> designed for it.
> Say you had a card with this chip on it in a PCI
> slot, rather than
> calculating collision detection for every
> combination of objects in
> your scene, (which on a sequential processor takes
> thousands of
> cycles), you could keep every object in the card's
> on-board memory,
> and have it run all the collision detection tests in
> parallel, at a
> fraction of the processing time.
> 
> Something like this would need to be very
> standardised though (like
> graphics cards) for it to have any market impact.
> 
> 
> On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 05:36:08 -0800 (PST), Vrej
> Melkonian
> <vmelkon at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Is it possible to create a special chip for
> physics?
> > It's not like graphics that can really benefit
> from a
> > specially designed chip.
> > Like the article mentions, a dual CPU or dual core
> may
> > do the job.
> 
> 
> -- 
> MrTrick
>
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