As soon as Leopard is released I’m on board with Unity. I have a high end PC with a PhysX card. Does Unity 2.0 support accelerated hardware physics? If not, how come? Would it be challenging to implement?
Thanks.
Right now Unity does not use PhysX hardware.
How come? Are you planning to implement it within a later release? How difficult would it be to get it up and running ourselves?
Since there are no (I think) PhysX cards for Macs and only the Mac Pro could possibly accept them anyway, testing would be a major pain.
Aren’t PPU’s on the way out due to the popularity multi-core CPU’s have gained?
Nope, for the same reason that GPUs aren’t on the way out. (i.e., a specialized and highly parallel processor is going to be way faster than a few general purpose CPU cores.) However, as GPUs get more generalized, they could take over the function of PPUs.
Also, it’s not like the world has been flooded with PPUs in the first place…
–Eric
Right, you could theoretically make a dedicated piece of hardware for every application, or suite of applications, but your market is going to be much more limited if you go that way. That kind of thing used to be required in a lot of fields. Just because it exists and is the best tool for the job doesn’t mean that anyone will buy or support it. The Playstation 3, for example, doesn’t have a PPU, but it’s got a few nice CPU cores that can get the job done very well.
I have read about plans of having either one core or multi-core GPU’s being used like a PPU, or having an actual PPU on the graphics card itself. I guess there would need to be some kind of killer app that required PPU power in order for enough people to get interested in a standalone product. Does this exist somewhere?