Discussion With AGEIA

Recently, Thomas and I had the chance to sit down with the CEO of AGEIA, Manju Hedge, and discuss the state of affairs in the physics industry. We asked the tough questions and AGEIA had some great answers.

AGEIA is a company that, over the course of the last two years, has gone from a virtual nobody to one of the front runners in the hardware world. They have accomplished this task thanks in no small part to their one-of-a-kind physics processing unit (PPU). The PhysX PPU is, by all accounts, a technological marvel. However, what use is the cutting-edge technology when it can’t really be used to its utmost? AGEIA’s CEO Manju Hedge sat down with us to answer this question and more.

After the conversation, Thomas and I were pretty impressed with what AGEIA had to say. So much so that we couldn’t just let the other write the article. Hence, we will both be writing this article, which is an overview of our conversation, and providing you with the latest information from the first and only physics hardware company.

New Features
First, I want to tell you a little bit about AGEIA’s latest advancement in their physics engine. This update is SDK version 2.6 and includes a plethora of new and exciting physics capabilities. These features range from the deformable metals, impact retention, self-collision prevention, Vista and Linux support, and more optimizations of existing features. I was actually able to see a demonstration of some of these new features while I was in New York for the DigitalLife event. Allow me to break this down by feature:

Deformable Metals

This is a revolutionary feature in physics. This is not a texture based, rendered deformation, but a complete deformation of the object/wireframe itself. For example, in Counter-Strike: Source you can shoot at barrels and rendered debris will fall from it. In addition, marks will be left from each bullet impact. These marks, however, are merely a change in texture, or the image layered on top of the barrel object. Using extreme detail and a bit of light magic, this can appear as 3D and give the illusion that the barrel is actually deformed. The problem lies in the fact that this can only remain for so long. These "decals", the bullet holes, have to be tracked and recorded, but once a certain number are created, they start disappearing in the order at which they appeared.

Here is where deformable metals completely changes the way we interact with the environment. Now these barrels actually deform before your very eyes. No decals or texture manipulations are necessary.

You may remember that I posted a demonstration video that I received from AGEIA. Click here to view that now. As you watch the video, note how the barrels are hitting each other and the objects around them and deforming accordingly. However, one thing to note is that there is no end to the deformations. Most games will start deleting decals when you reach about 100. However, while at the AGEIA booth, I created an infinite number of deformations to the barrels, a car object, and several other demonstrations. Not once did any of these objects snap back into place after creating a deformation elsewhere. This is because of the fact there is a dedicated processor in charge of not only calculating the deformations, but keeping track and calculating further deformations. It truly is an amazing feature. Now you may complain that the objects in the demonstration deformed too easily. Well, the AGEIA staff showed me specifically that a developer using the SDK can actually change the density, metal strength, and other variables to be able to simulate the entire metal spectrum.

This kind of calculation can only be handled when offloaded to a PhysX processor. Pretty Amazing.

{mospagebreak heading=Defotitle=Impact Retnetion and Self-Collision Prevention}Impact Retention and Self-Collision Prevention

This one is actually something I have been wanting for a long time. Have you ever played an MMORPG, FPS, or even an RPG game where the clothes on your characters, or even the cloth in the environment is very realistic, but as it waves or moves it clips into other objects. The best example I can think of are the capes in Guild Wars.

These capes signify your guild and as they hang on your back, the can clip into your legs or your armor while running or standing still. For those of you who may not understand what I mean by clipping, it’s when one object and another object exist at the same point in the engine. Since the engine doesn’t know what to do, it renders both, which usually results in things like being able to see a gun sticking out of a closed door when a player is up against it, or armor being rendered partially through the wearer’s cape. This kind of thing occurs all the time and we have become very used to it. With this new feature in the PhysX engine, only one object can occupy the same location at a given time. This means that if the cape is in one spot, the armor cannot move through the cape, and if it tries to, the cape will be ruffled accordingly.

Physics Power Struggle
These new features are all very much revolutionary and will, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be implemented in future engines and games, but what is there to play it on? Well, the two big names in the gaming physics area are AGEIA and Havok, and they are both trying to get you to use their product.

One of the most common misconceptions is that AGEIA and Havok are competitors. This is not the case at all. You see, AGEIA makes their money from selling the PhysX hardware. Their PhysX API, the software side of the physics performance, is licensed to game developers for free. Yes that’s right, free. Now let’s look at Havok. Havok makes their money by licensing their API out to game developers. That means that they are not really competitors because each is profiting from a different means. However, the fact that they are both in the physics market and that they both offer their own physics engines does lead to some growing pains for the technology.

You see, in order to work most effectively, the PhysX hardware needs to be run on a game that has the PhysX API implemented from the ground up. Currently, the only game that really has this is CellFactor: Combat Training. The performance increase offered by the PhysX hardware in this game is truly amazing, as relayed in our review of the ASUS PhysX P1. However, in other games, such as Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW), the performance increase from the PhysX hardware is negated by the performance decrease sustained by the video card as a result of having to render the extra detail. Unfortunately the PhysX hardware does not work to its potential on all games that have physics, and doesn’t work at all on games that do not support it; using the PhysX hardware on Counter-Strike: Source will not give you a performance increase. This is due to the fact that the PhysX API is not the same as the Havok 2 engine or any other variation of a physics engine that is out there. The PhysX API takes advantage of various features of the PhysX hardware that other physics engines do not.

So although Havok and AGEIA are not technically competitors, the competition between their two APIs is causing some problems for the growth of gaming physics. Each company has quite a few game developers working with their physics engine on games slated for release in the near future. However, the benefits of the PhysX hardware, or any other physics hardware for that matter (the G80’s Quantum Physics Engine capabilities not withstanding), are diminished when the game being played does not utilize the physics engine designed for that hardware. For instance, without the PhysX API implemented in a game, the PhysX hardware has to emulate into the given physics engine, which limits performance of the hardware and does not utilize the majority of its features.
{mospagebreak title=Availability, Closing Thoughts}

The only solution to this that we see is some sort of agreement between the two companies that will allow the hardware designed for one to work well with the software designed for the other. You might think it silly that two ‘competing’ companies would have any interest in doing this, but judging from our conversation with AGEIA’s CEO, Manju Hedge, such an agreement does not seem so farfetched.

Availability
One of the big questions we had for AGEIA going into this interview was concerning their plans for accommodating users on the cutting edge. Top of the line motherboards are dropping PCI slots like they’re going out of style, and those PCI slots that are still available are usually occupied by a sound card or TV Tuner. In response to this problem, AGEIA will be launching a version of their card for PCI-Express x1 slots in 2007. The different bus interface should not affect the performance of the card in any way whatsoever, but the ability to use the card in virtually any production motherboard is definitely a plus.

For users who are not interested in buying a video card from ASUS or BFG Technologies and installing it themself, AGEIA has secured the following OEM’s as providers of the PhysX hardware in their gaming PCs: Alienware, Dell, Falcon Northwest, VoodooPC, Velocity Micro. This opens the door to even more gamers, as there are many of us out there who rely on OEM’s such as these when purchasing new gaming machines.

Final Thoughts
We relayed in our ASUS PhysX P1 review that the best way to go when handling the computations for a specific task is a dedicated processor. This was proven to be the case in the audio realm not too long ago, and it will, or at least it was when we said that, most assuredly be the case in the physics arena as well. However, we wrote that article before we were really sure of the performance or specifications of the next generation video cards. NVIDIA’s G80 has since exceeded our expectations and shown us the true power of a unified shader architecture. These unified shaders, although currently only used for vertex and pixel calculations, can very well be programmed to perform physics calculations too. That is premise behind NVIDIA’s new Quantum Physics Engine, a development that we have yet to see the fruits of. Whether or not the PhysX hardware is going to be the best platform on which to run physics calculations is a debate that is getting more and more interesting as time goes on.

We would like to thank Manju Hedge and the helpful folks at AGEIA for making our conversation possible. We believe that the information we obtained from this meeting will help gamers everywhere with their purchasing decisions, as well as give them a firm grasp of the future of gaming physics.

Related Material:

ASUS PhysX P1 Review
PhysX Review Addendum
Deformable Objects Video

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