Actually, that might explain a lot. But I digress.

The point is that Nvidia, unlike Intel, is acutely tuned in to what people are saying about it — and can be quick to respond.

I well recall how, at last year’s Nvision event, one fledgling journalist received a stern dressing down from PR director Derek Perez mere hours after she’d posted an online article that cheekily – but accurately – reported his impression of CEO Jen-Hsun Huang’s keynote address. (For the record, it was “dull and boring.”)

So I wasn’t wholly surprised when this morning, at the conclusion of my meeting with CUDA general manager Sanford Russell, I was ushered into a luxurious suite on the twentieth floor of San Jose’s Fairmont Hotel for an impromptu chat with Tony Tamasi, Nvidia’s Senior VP for content and technology, on the subject of my last blog post.

A billion dollars on CUDA

It turned out that Tamasi wanted to respond to two points. The first was the doubt I had expressed over whether CUDA could ever be a real money-maker for Nvidia.

“Supercomputing,” he assured me, “is a billion-dollar market.”

This I could not deny; but given CUDA’s apparent focus on academia, it seemed a surprisingly ambitious figure for Nvidia to be bandying about.

So I asked: “Have you made a billion dollars from it this year?”

“Of course not,” Tamasi laughed. “But we believe in the potential. We’ve been investing heavily in that for years. And when the market arrives, we’re going to be at the head of it.”

He showed me a slide demonstrating how Nvidia expects its investment to pay off:

— and I could only agree that – if PowerPoint was to be believed – there did appear to be a lot of money out there for the taking.

“So you’re going to sell ten thousand GPUs to the Department of Defence?”

“At least!” he declared confidently.

There’s no telling how much this market will really turn out to be worth to Nvidia. But the company’s investments in research have indeed positioned it well to “trickle up” into industry and government; and with CUDA now programmable in C++, the company’s ambitions are sounding increasingly credible. I wouldn’t bet against the technology growing quickly in these areas – in the short term, at least.

Sizing up Larrabee

But what of the longer game? I was half joking when I suggested that Larrabee might displace CUDA, but Tamasi agreed that it was a possibility.

“Intel is… not very excited when they see a researcher talking about porting code from Intel CPUs to Nvidia GPUs and getting a hundred-fold speed-up,” he predicted.

“And those are the super-high-margin juicy CPUs for Intel.”

“So Intel is defending their computing front. And I agree with you that Larabee is at least partly an effort to try to keep applications from going to the GPU style of parallelism.”

Is Nvidia worried about the long-term challenge?

“Nobody knows how good Larrabee is,” Tamasi mused. “Probably Intel doesn’t know how good Larrabee is. So we take them incredibly seriously.”

“There are strengths and weaknesses to their style of architecture. And I just don’t know how that’s going to play out.”

Certainly, the list of games using PhysX looks healthy enough. Already out are Bionic Commando, Army of Two, City of Villains, Empire: Total War, Gears of War 2, Haze, Mass Effect and Mirror’s Edge. Other promising titles, such as APB and Borderlands, both of which garnered plenty of attention at E3, are in the pipeline.

At a recent briefing, Nvidia unveiled another recent game to make heavy use of PhysX: Terminator Salvation. Unfortunately, though, it’s a typical movie tie-in, averaging scores of just above 50% since its release. And, while the demo (which showed the game running with and without PhysX looked impressive, we didn’t see any effects that couldn’t be achieved with systems other than PhysX. We’ve also struggled to think of many games where the presence of physics is genuinely game-changing rather than just an aesthetic enhancement.

There’s also a formidable list of games that don’t use Nvidia’s technology: BioShock, Company of Heroes, MotorStorm, Spore, Fallout 3, Fable 2, Halo 3, Killzone 2 and Half-Life 2 all use Havok, which was purchased by Intel in 2007 but, at the moment at least, is available for use on any hardware including PC and the big three consoles.

Nevertheless, the fragmented nature of the gaming physics market means that the Irish firm’s technology faces many of the same problems as PhysX even without being tied down to one hardware manufacturer.

Other gaming firms, including Crytek, are often happier to use their own physics engines instead of third-party technology. “Crytek has its own in-house physics system”, says Mark Atkinson, Crytek’s director of technology, which gives them “a single solution which can be optimised for all target platforms” at the same time – and, since Crysis 2 has been confirmed as a PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 release, this is obviously the easiest solution.

When developing Far Cry 2, Ubisoft eschewed PhysX and instead used Havok, a competing physics engine that was bought by Intel in 2007. Vincent Greco, a technical co-ordinator with Ubisoft, explained that “different games have different needs” and that, while Havok was the system of choice for Far Cry 2, PhysX “is a great technology” that Ubisoft has used to good effect in other big titles, such as Rainbow Six Vegas and EndWar.

So, why are some big publishers reluctant to use PhysX in their big games? Perhaps it’s a question of hardware.

The activation of PhysX on all GeForce 8000-series and newer cards in August 2008 brought to an end the days of having to buy a discrete card to handle physics calculations, instead moving these procedures onto the GPU.

In theory, that meant that the majority of gamers using Nvidia cards were able to unlock the hidden power of physics and suddenly populate their games with realistic sparks, gently swelling water and other impressive effects, increasing realism ten-fold. It also meant that using PhysX had never been cheaper or easier.

In practise, though, Nvidia needs a near-monopoly on hardware to make PhysX worthwhile – and its position in the discrete GPU market is looking more precarious now that it has done over the past couple of years. Various reports from the end of 2008 cite the release of ATI’s Radeon HD 4000-series as the major reason why ATI’s market share had grown from 35% to 40% in three months, forcing Nvidia to cut the prices of some of its flagship products in the meantime. In the same period, overall sales of desktop GPUs fell, shrinking the potential market for PhysX (and any other competing physics system) further.

With ATI coming up with superb GPUs and gaining market share, it’s become even less tempting for developers to spend hundreds of hours incorporating PhysX into their games while knowing that a large proportion of players won’t be able to see those effects in action.

The picture is no rosier on consoles, either. Both systems use older hardware and, while Nvidia makes its PhysX middleware engine available to developers on all three consoles, we’ve seen that plenty of developers would rather use their own engines or other third party tools instead of Nvidia’s technology.

In this sort of market – with ATI closing the gap and Intel’s Larrabee apparently on the horizon – it’s going to become more difficult for Nvidia to cram PhysX into enough games to make its purchase of Ageia a worthwhile venture.

At the moment, there’s little chance of most of the big developers and publishers using PhysX but, without widespread support, there’s no chance of Nvidia being able to grow PhysX into the dominant physics system that it surely hopes for. It’s a double-edged sword and, without a drastic shift, it’s difficult to see Nvidia making any sort of genuine progress in the physics market.

]]> http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2009/06/30/will-nvidia-physx-ever-be-worthwhile/feed/ 3 http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/05/23/nvidias-confused-gpus/ http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/05/23/nvidias-confused-gpus/#comments Fri, 23 May 2008 09:20:13 +0000 Mike Jennings http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/?p=822 Nvidia aren’t known for their demure and shy antics, so I wasn’t surprised at a press briefing a few weeks ago when they launched an attack on what some quarters – namely Intel with their new Larrabee GPU – who have identified ray-tracing as the future of graphics.

They spent a great deal of time assuring the assembled members of the IT press that it was a waste of time – every game since before the turn of the Millennium (indeed, since the demise of voxels) because every game is made using polygons and that developers wouldn’t want to alter their techniques and systems around a new, somewhat experimental technology.

So, why have Nvidia gone and bought a ray-tracing company?

It’s certainly a bit of a strange move for a company that’s previously denounced the system as pretty worthless for Nvidia’s main market: games. Then again, they did buy Ageia and their Physx technology, which has barely made a ripple in the virtual oceans of games like Crysis and Oblivion, so they do have a history of odd investments.

But, for all this prophesising, their position has recently take a bit of an about-face. The company’s CTO, David Kirk, claimed that ray-tracing was suddenly part of their plans – and that they could integrate it with traditional rendering techniques to make games and graphical applications look even better. Even so, he still doesn’t sound entirely convinced, emphasising that ray-tracing is only ‘part of the future‘, admitting that, at the moment, ‘ray tracing is currently significantly slower than rasterization’.

So, what’s caused such a dramatic turnaround?

We’ve theorised before that Nvidia, for all their bluster, seem to be making various loud, angry noises out of fear. Sure, very little is known about Larrabee, but it’s another competitor in Nvidia’s main marketplace which, aside from ATI, they’ve had little recent competition in.

This just seems like more evidence to support this line of thought – if Intel are going to be incorporating their own ray-tracing and physics technology in their new GPU – developed in-house – then Nvidia need to compete. What better way, then, than by buying up companies already specialised in these things?

Or is there another method to Nvidia’s (apparent) madness?

Evidently, it’s decided to come out on the offensive: Nvidia boss Jen-Hsun Huang recently lambasted Intel’s integrated graphics, which have long been a staple of PCs that don’t need to play games and edit demanding videos, as ‘a joke’. He also boasted of his plans to ‘open a can of whoop-ass’ onto Intel, which must be quaking in its boots – after all, its CPUs haven’t done that well, and they certainly not market leaders with no real competitors. Ahem.

In a move that could be likened to David squaring up to Goliath and promising to break his legs with his arms tied behind his back and a blindfold on, Nvidia has also now announced its new chipset. The MCP79 is designed to stomp all over Intel’s well-defended backyard after recent claims that Intel “can’t write a graphics driver to save their life”.

It’s certainly a brave position to take – at a recent press event, Nvidia was keen to stress that, as well as excellent processors, Intel’s mighty marketing department was responsible for recent success. Given its dominance in the CPU market, I certainly wouldn’t put it past Intel to seriously frighten Nvidia with its new graphics card – in fact, judging by the aggressive and almost petulant reaction emerging from leading Nvidia figures these days, it could be reasoned that the company’s already pretty worried.

Even so, it makes for a tantalising future for graphics, as there hasn’t been a serious third player in the market for a fair few years – and a bit of playground scrapping could work wonders for the price of new GPU technology.