An interview with a Kylotonn

Hilbert: Most of us geeks know that a company Ageia has been developing the PhysX PPU, your title will utilize this new technology. I have to explain this to our audience, Ageia believes that games can be rendered as far better experience once you will not only calculate pixels but also common real-world physics by a special processor. Together with ASUS and soon other manufacturers they will be releasing an add-on card with no less than 125 million transistors on-board purely to calculate Physics in your games. So now the questions, Bet On Soldier is going to support this new technology, why?

We are using the Novodex engine from Ageia for all the physics of the game. It allows us realistic interactions with the environment. But the PhysX opens a new era for managment of physics in game. As it is specialized in processing physics, this chip can let the video card express its full potential for the graphics.

Hilbert: For the consumer this means building a very expensive high-end PC and then having to cough up another 250 USD for the PhysX board. Wouldn't it be much more logical if you integrated the PhysX model as a software engine into the game and then let the Physics actually be calculated on the videocard? Especially the more high-end graphics cards like the GeForce 6800 GT (SLI), 7800 GTX, Radeon x850 XT(PE) seem to have a some unused reserves to compute as our CPU's aren't fast enough the feed the GPU data, why not utilize that reserve in the form of a software PhysX engine that places the workload in the GPU?

Programmers rarely develop for the hardware itself; rather they use an API (Application Programming Interface) with an HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer). This is the case for Graphical Hardware (by means of Direct3D and OpenGL), for Sound Hardware (by means of DirectSound and OpenAL) and will be the case for Physical Hardware. The NOVODEX API is developed by AGEIA in conjunction with their PPU (Physical Processing Unit). All that can run on hardware will, the rest will run in software.

Dispatching the workload to the various GPUs is exactly the same as dispatching it to a specialized unit, except that the PPU will run some physics widely-used routines (such as collision detection) purely in hardware (GPUs kind of “de-specialized” themselves by becoming programmable but still perform a vector dot operation in a single cycle).

The question of data transfer between host CPU and external Processing Units will be a major point in latest architectures, that’s for sure.

Hilbert: In the neverending quest for high-quality rendering versus performance, how much of an advantage is the PhysX PPU going to offer you in terms of framerate and what other key advantages will the PhysX PPU bring to your audience compared to users with a 'normal' gaming rig without the add-on card?

Like users with High-End graphical cards could benefit from advanced eye-candy (soften shadows, high detailed models and textures), PPU users would benefit from advanced realism in terms of clouds, gibs or particles physical behaviours. Likewise, collision detection, which is a major CPU consumer in game engines can be deferred to PPU leaving host processor idle for other duties such as AI calculations (until an AI Processing Unit arises of course) and pure gameplay code, to create more interesting and rich content.

Hilbert: When can we expect the release of Bet on Soldier?

The release of BoS is now planned for early September 2005.

We hope that you will enjoy B.O.S, we have tried to create a refreshing gaming experience and built a solid Game Engine to create even more interesting games in the future, expanding gameplay without the burden of the technical aspect.

Suffice to say we here at Guru3D.com are looking forward to this game, it looks and seems to be a huge title that'll bring gaming to a new level. For developing that new experience and of course answering our questions we thank you very much.

Thank you again for giving us the opportunity to talk a little about our project, we hope that you will enjoy Bet on Soldier.