What is physics card slot on mother board for?

[picard]

what is the purpose of physics card on motherboard?

Is the physics card an add on just like PCI card? Can some one explain it to me?

 

[rammedstein]

Baron you... oh, your not baron, nvm, lol, depends on what kind of physics card, ati intended to turn a video card into a physics card to help make games more realistic, but also ageia makes physics cards, they are also supposed to do this but actually, in real life, it makes no difference what-so-ever.

 

[james_8970]

Can you give me a link, because I don't know what your getting confused with. There is no such thing as a physics slot, there are only AGP, PCI and PCI-e slots, on up to date motherboards anyways.
I believe you getting confused with how ATI can have 3 cards on one setup now. If this is the case, what is happening is that you're having two cards running in xfire, then you have the third card that is dedicated to physics.

As for Ageia's cards, I'm just waiting for them to quit producing them. They serve no purpose.
James

 

[Insane_Maniac]

The Ageia Physics card is a card that goes into the PCI slot. There are only two games that utilize the Ageia Physics Card. That being GRAW and the Cell Factor Demo. UT3 should utilize Ageia later on. We will most likely see a PCI-E 1x physics card very soon.

In terms of ATI and Nvidia using physics in their cards, when I read about the press releases about 6 months ago, they were going to be similar to physics but not true physics. More like eye candy than anything else. Wish Havok FX creates a card to compete with Ageia's card, but who knows, the utilization of the Quad Core and Dual core should do something different.

 

[james_8970]

with todays and tomorrows technology there is no point on having a physics card. Having quad core processors should be more then enough powwer to do all the physics you'll need.
James

 

[metrazol]

The physics card slot should be a small dust trap if used correctly.

 

[yourmothersanastronaut]

Make sure you get a slot cover to keep the dust out, it'd be a lot more useful than a PhysX card! :lol:

 

[james_8970]

it'd be a cheaper and more useful alternative to a physics card :twisted:

 

[nicolasb]

Can you give me a link, because I don't know what your getting confused with. There is no such thing as a physics slot, there are only AGP, PCI and PCI-e slots, on up to date motherboards anyways.

I imagine he is referring to the third x16 PCIe connector on motherboards like the Intel BadAxe2.

Motherboards like this were designed at a time when Nvidia and ATI were both making a big song and dance about the possibility of using video cards to do physics calculations. The idea was that high-end gamers would want to use two video cards in Crossfire/SLI mode, plus a third one in the third slot that did Physics and nothing else.

Hardware-assisted physics (performed either by a graphics chip or a dedicated physics card such as the one from Ageia) seems to be going out of fashion at the moment - a shame, as a well-designed physics processor could easily be 10 or 20 times as fast as a quad-core CPU.

I suspect it's a "chicken-and-egg" problem: hardly anyone owns a physics card, so there's no incentive for games developers to make games that are compatible with Physics cards; that means there are no physics-accelerated games; that means that there's no incentive for anyone to buy a physics card.

There was a similar problem in the early days of 3D-accelerated graphics, but with 3D there was a way through: you could have exactly the same game, same gameplay, same things happening, and just make it look much, much better if you were using 3D hardware. By contrast it's impossible to have "low physics" and "high physics" versions of the same game, because the physics affects the behaviour of all of the objects in the game: with acceleration and without acceleration are two completely different games, which is far more complicated to balance and maintain.

That means that a game designed to run adequately without physics acceleration can never be significantly different or better when it is using accelerated physics: you're limited to one or two graphically pretty "special effects" sequences, but never anything that actually affects the gameplay.

It's probably also a lack of power in the GPU department. If a game is using accelerated physics the number of objects on screen can be enormously much bigger than the number of objects in any current game; but if you ask the CPU and GPU to actually render that scene on the screen, everything grinds to a halt, because they simply can't draw 3D scenes as complex as that at acceptable speeds. The result is that, when you add accelerated physics to a game, the game tends to look much better but run much slower, which gamers don't like. For accelerated physics to be useful you need to havea lot of CPU and GPU capacity to spare.