(no subject)

[da]

We've got quite the storm right now. Just about pitch black, too.

Over lunch I was checking out new CPU specs and came across a new category of hardware: Physics cards. New games apparently "need" more than graphics acceleration, they should have physics acceleration too, since CPUs are no more optimized for physics calculations than they are for 3d rendering calculations. More busy stuff on the screen at a time, yay. Just what I need, surely. (Oh, wait, I'm not the target market. OK.)

Speaking of which, this video makes me happy.

Comments

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Are there that many uses for this that would not be games? I mean, I could totally see scientists getting excited, but I imagine that the physics woul dbe too simple for their use.

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

protein folding? My understanding is that one of these cards can manage 10,000 particles...

[zanate.livejournal.com]

No, you're right, scientific interest would be small-- if that's what you mean by not being the target market, you're right. And from an engineering standpoint, maybe, just maybe there might be some way to apply our structural and fluid solver code to take advantage of such hardware, but I'm not sure it would be to as large a benefit unless this hardware were very flexible, and besides: our customers don't blink an eye about spending tens of thousands on clusters which said solvers already run on anyway.

I gotta think that if the benefit of the add-on's architecture for physics simulation calculation is as great as they claim, then they'll end up as an integral part of the design of any serious consumer VR system.

[melted-snowball.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I dunno. FPGA's can be a huge, huge win (we're mildly interested in applying them to the kinds of problems we work on).

This does push my, "but, dammit, the software folks get peanuts compared to the cost of the hardware" buttons.