Physics Hardware

Posted on:June 06 2006

Looks like more and more time and money is spent on developing physics hardware. ATI just revealed it's 'boundless gaming', their backend for Havok FX, meaning physics calculated on GPUs. Simulating 20000 objects colliding with each other looks pretty impressive like on this image but another questions arises: Do I need this? I'd rather spend my money on gameplay or story telling hardware if something like this existed. Today's games would need it IMO.

Comments:

> Today's games would need it IMO

Definitely!

matt

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2006-06-06 20:21:00

When firms like ATI, NVidia, Microsoft stays behind this I suppose that soon we will get a new hardware requirements for most modern games.

etcaptor

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2006-06-07 06:42:00

It's easier to sell good graphics and physics... Noone dislikes games because of that. But game industry does not want to take a risk and invest in good story (too good or to different for players?) and gameplay (to different from left, right, shoot, run). Same reason why we're seing (more or less) same movies all over again. :(

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2006-06-07 13:07:00

But that looks VERY impressive to me!

Martins

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2006-06-07 16:33:00

Well, at least it won't harm story and gameplay, plus it's quite cool. ;)

Matthias

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2006-06-07 16:40:00

Who knows? Maybe it works this way:

More money spent on physics stuff -> less money for left for a good story.

Today it (sometimes) seems to be the same with graphics and gameplay/story.
I personnally prefer good gameplay even if the graphics are poor (or even 2d ;) ).

clayman

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2006-06-07 21:01:00

"Do I need this?"
Do you play all your games with the resolution at 640x480 with minimal textures and all the graphic options turned off? If not, then it seems like you are one of the target market for this feature. :)

Factory

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2006-06-08 00:03:00