ATI has displayed its own solution for how to handle advanced physical effects in games at Computex in Taiwan and it is a solution using plain graphics cards, Radeon X1x00-based such, to calculate these effects. ATI has been boasting its solution quite much and claimed that its Radeon X1900 XT offered up to 9 times the performance of AGEIA’s external physics processor PhysX. Just as expected AGEIA has in turn answered to ATI’s statements by sending in some comments to Firingsquad.com where it is quite doubtful towards how ATI’s solution is being presented in comparison to AGEIA’s PhysX solution. Below you can see the comments sent in by AGEIA’s Chief of Marketing, Michael Steel.
- We’re glad that they’ve validated physics as the next big thing in gaming
- The performance claims appear to be based solely on gigaflops of the Radeon chips and an assumption of PhysX gigaflops, but that is not a meaningful way to measure physics performance. That’s like suggesting that the more wheels I have on my car, the faster I will go. Physics requires much more than raw gigaflops.
- Graphics processors are designed for graphics. Physics is an entirely different environment. Why would you sacrifice graphics performance for questionable physics? You’ll be hard pressed to find game developers who don’t want to use all the graphics power they can get, thus leaving very little for anything else in that chip.
- “Boundless Gaming” is actually enabled by AGEIA’s Gaming Power Triangle in which the PhysX processor adds true physics to the mix instead of leaving it to a repurposed graphics processor.
- In the end, what matters is who develops software for the product. There are games shipping for PhysX today and more than 20 announced for 2006. In addition, over 65 developers of more than 100 games are deep in development for PhysX. No specific games are announced even in development mode for ATI.
- PhysX is here now
The physics war is truly raging and to AGEIA, which has based its entire existence on the success of this industry, the outcome of this battle is extremely important.
