Physics

[cromwell]

Do you think CA, will use the new physics card that is comming out. IT's supposed to handle thousands of calcs per second, and RTW or future TW games would have thousands of clashes...lol.

those not familiar with the Physics card comming out visit. http://www.ageia.com/index.html


Later,

Cromwell

[alpaca]

Well there is a chance that they use it in their next engine imo (after all SEGA's already using it in some game), but it's remote.
I guess they'd only do that if the processor spreaded like a wildfire ;)

[shifty157]

Generally games arent designed with certain processors in mind. As long as a processor works the game will run fine. You dont 'use' or 'not use' a processor. The processor you linked to has been designed with gaming in mind however and you should see an improvement in physics based games such as HalfLife2 and other FPSs. The Total War games however do not use any kind of physics engine and therefore will experience very little improvement.

[alpaca]

No offense meant, but your post is nonsense.
Game designers always develop for certain systems, it just happens to be the case that nigh all cpus for PCs are IBM-compatible (x86). Additionally, games are always designed to work with certain drivers (i.e. interfaces between software and hardware) which indirectly links them to specific processors; it also improves performance to use special advanced chipset features or it wouldn't make sense to improve those at all.
I was also not talking about a cpu or graphics processor but about a special hardware physics processor that would have to be used, and RTW does use a physics engine (that e.g. calculates the projectile trajectory) and it's impossible to create any 3d game without one.
Thus, it is possible for Game Designers to have hardware instead of software calculate physics, which will have a better performance than calculating it with the cpu (as the physics processor will be optimized for this); however it doesn't improve performance as much for Total War as it does for FPS because the game's main calculations are unit positions and collision checks, so it probably might be nice but not particularly useful.

[Lentonius]

although the new total war game may be very 'heavy' on pc's in terms of amount of memory and graphical capabilities involved, they need to still appeal to 'middle budget' computers, and therefore if making it for the higher end dual core and this new processor, the new game will not get as many copies sold.

looking at how things are improving, my PC will struggle with the new game looking at the early screens, but it will be made to work fine with most P4 or athlon 64 processors, the pure reason being that everybody practically has one...

i agree with alpaca in the fact that CA will make it based on popularity of systems and such- i highly doubt that in the next year or so this processor could have more sales than intel or AMD and be the 'household' name

[alpaca]

I think you misunderstand what that thing is: It's an additional hardware device only used for calculating physics. It's no CPU or something.
If you remember those graphics accelerator cards we had in the 90s, it's a bit similar to that.

[Lentonius]

Oh yeah, one of those add on type things....