Physics in Consoles

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There been quite a lot of discussion about Physics engines for the PC enviorment recently but i haven't heard much about it for consoles. So do you know if there are any plans to improve the physic engines in Console games, as after down loading the trailler for Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 it seems that consoles deperatly need to work on Physics. There were bits bouncing and floating all over the place with no sence of realism.
 
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Off the top of my head, with out doing much research. THe PS3 Cell architecture is basically a number crunching super beast. Great for physics if implemented properly.

The 360 has the ability to portion parts of the GPU to Physics tasks. As it happens the architecture of GPUs is great for phyisics computations.
 
Soldato
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In theory game developers could use one of the Xenons cores to do physics and still have the other two for the rest of the game. How easy / practical this would be is another matter.

No doubt the same could be done with the ps3 however I would imagine it would be a lot more difficult to get right.
 
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oweneades said:
In theory game developers could use one of the Xenons cores to do physics and still have the other two for the rest of the game. How easy / practical this would be is another matter.

No doubt the same could be done with the ps3 however I would imagine it would be a lot more difficult to get right.
They have 6 cores, not 3 iirc.
 
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It'll totally depend upon the game and the developer really, as if you want to utilise some of the power of the consoles for complex physics, you're going to have to cut back on a little eye candy or similar.

Dead or Alive is a horrid example though, as it's hardly a realistic game where you'd thing "hmmm, I wish those objects fell and bounced around properly, it would make the game feel so more realistic" etc :p
 
Soldato
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Taken directly from wikipedia (seems to agree to most other sites as well)

wikipedia said:
90 nm process, 165 million transistors
Three symmetrical cores, each two way SMT-capable and clocked at 3.2 GHz
One VMX128 (similar to AltiVec) SIMD Dual threaded.
2× (128×128 bit) register file for each VMX unit, 6 in total.
1 MB L2 cache (lockable by the GPU) running at half-speed (1.6 GHz) with a 256-bit bus
51 gigabytes per second of L2 memory bandwidth (256 bit × 1600 MHz)
DOT products performance: 9.6 billion per second
116 GFLOPS theoretical peak performance
ROM storing Microsoft private encrypted keys
Big endian architecture.

(sorry I got curious lol)
 
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BillytheImpaler said:
A-ha! I was talking about the Cell, not the Xenon. My bad. ;)

:) They do share roughly the same base I believe.

No doubt as I said above they should both be able to set aside certain processes to do physics (or like in COD2 where the game developers used one core to do the smoke effects)
 
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oweneades said:
:) They do share roughly the same base I believe.

They're similar in there functioning, but Cell is an odd cookie as it has asymmetrical processing units (One PPE to 8 SPEs - though the number of SPEs is dropping to try and shore up Sony's rubbish yield) where as Xenon is a more conventional 3 core SMT system.

Both should be pretty good for physics I would have thought, I don't know how well the current games on Xbox360 take advantage of the 3 cores, but I would have thought there would be plenty of CPU cycles going unused.
 
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There are probably more console games than you realise that use physics engines, it's just that since consoles and their gamers are generally less technical, it's not advertised as much as with PC games.

PS3 is liscenced to use AGEIA's PhysX SDK, NovodeX, and Havok's physics and animation engine.

Wow didn't realise the PS3 SDK included all 3 (although I think NovodeX and PhysX are now the same thing). Good move by Sony to include them. Although it means that multiplatform games won't be able to use them unless they have a license anyway. But at least it'll be an incentive for developers to make PS3 exclusives since they are getting an expensive physics engine thrown in for free.
 
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