a question on RSX for Techs

[cliffbo]

having recently read a PC format mag article stating that Nvidia have signed a deal with Havoc to incorporate their FX based physics engine on their GPUs, that utilises any spare copacity to power enhanced visual physics effects, would this be of any use to the PS3s chipset and perhaps be an indication of yet to be revealed use of the RSX?

[xbdestroya]

No - Cell will be much more useful for physics than would be any spare cycles on RSX. What developers are probably going for will be 100% utilization of RSX for graphics purposes in any event. None of this GP-GPU stuff; that's what the Cell's there for.

In PC's it makes sense since GPUs are so much more 'powerful' than the typical x86 CPU on tasks they can be brought to bare on.

[cliffbo]

well thats put a dampener on my excitement... cheers XB... i think :)

[Arnaud_M]

Using GPU for physics is only a last-resort, as it draws too much computing power from the GPU (Nvidia recommends a SLI setup for this), and it is done only because x86 CPU are not powerful enough to do this efficiently. Cell on the other hand seems a wonderful CPU for such Physics engine, so you could safely rejoice ;-)

Arnaud