Ageia – An Insight

Interview

Whoopty: Hi Dan, thanks for doing this interview with me.

Dan: That’s no problem at all.

Whoopty: Now, to kick things off, for those that don’t know, what is the idea behind PhysX?

Dan: Gaming has come along way in the last few years, however most of the improvements have been geared towards graphics; visual imprpvemenrs. If you look back to early FPS games, although modern games are more complex than back then, the gameplay itself hasn’t significantly changed. I think that’s where the general idea of advancing physics in games is coming from, you can really change the way a game plays, not just the way it looks.

Whoopty: I see, and what about the PhysX add-on card, what was the thinking behind that?

Dan: This was based around the fact that physics calculations tend to add a lot of load to a PC, and we didn’t want people to have to choose between lots of physics effects, or lots of visual effects; so we put together the hardware to allow the physics calculations to be done independenatly from the rest of the PC.

Whoopty: What advantages does the PhysX SDK have over other physics based options such as the Havok engine?

Dan: The PhysX engine has been distributed hugely, much more than the Havok engine and it has also been around for so long, that we have an incredible ammount of experience using it. No piece of software is ever final, there is always something that you can improve on, and we are constantly improving our engine using not only our vast experience of its use in games but the feedback from developers. Basically, we are at a point when the PhysX SDK is much easier to use than any other software or hardware physics solutions out there.

Secondly, the cost. PhysX is completely free to use, so any game developer can use it for nothing. Finally, Epic Games have used our PhysX engine in their Unreal Engine 3, which shows that our SDK is a sophisitcated piece of software because UE3 is out there to be the best; and they decided to partner up with us.

Whoopty: There’s lots of controversy surrounding the PhysX card itself. Many people consider it redundant compared to dual core and quad core CPUs. How does the hardware compare to multi-cores in terms of performance?

Dan: Multi-core CPUs have been around for about 2 years now, and software developers are only just learning how to effectively start using a second core. So even though in the future, developers will be able to utilise 4, 8 cores or more – and they will definately be very useful – there is a learning curve with all new hardware. I mean, DX9 games are much better looking than they were when DX9 was first released, so it always takes time to utilise new technologies. What the PhysX card does, is completely remove the need for multithread programming for physics, making game developement much easier for the developers; so ease of use is the main point.

Secondly, dedicated hardware designed for one thing will always be more powerful than a CPU which is a multipurpose piece of hardware. The PhysX card was designed from the very beginning to deal with physics, so that’s what it’s good at. Although a core on a CPU can deal with physics, its not what its designed for and therfore is not as capable as the add-on card is.

Whoopty: Recently we wrote a review on how PhysX affects the visuals and gameplay of the newly released game, GRAW 2. How well do you feel PhysX was used in this game and how much more is the SDK capable of effecting the in-game environments?

Dan: When looking at physics in GRAW 2, you really have to split it into the Single Player game and the Ageia Island level. In the SP, I think physics was used very well as a lot of the environtments were destructable and you can really see the difference between having “Normal” CPU powered physics, and PhysX powered “Extreme” physics: people fell differently, there was more debris etc.

Looking at the Ageia Island level though, gives you a much better idea of what the hardware is capable of doing with the PhysX card. If you look at the differences between the single player and this level, I find the most impressive difference to be the weather effects because it really adds to the atmosphere. Also, a more subtle effect which shows the effort put in by the developers, is the collision detection on objects. If you shoot a plank of wood at the top, it breaks at the top, shoot in the middle it breaks in the middle and so on.

In terms of how much more PhysX can do, GRAW 2 currently has destructable trees which break in one piece from the base and collapse when they take a certain ammount of damage. It’s circumstances like these that we see some CPU bottlnecks because of the AI calculations that need to be made as it has to calculate the new path, “can I pass?”, “can I not pass?” and although the PhysX card is capable of calculating the tree breaking into 10 pieces, CPU bottlenecks would be very apparent.

Whoopty: Well you definately see performance rates drop when using the CPU for physics calculations in the singler player game compared to when using the PhysX card. For example, when blowing up a fence and the planks split into their seperate pieces.

Dan: The thing with the PhysX card, is it’s not designed to aid in game performance; that’s an added bonus. The idea is to add more effects to games and add more to the game play through physics. Ultimately, we want to see the same performance with the card that you would without the card, but with much more advanced physics effects so that you constantly have your 60FPS but with all the advanced effects that PhysX can bring.

Whoopty: Some people have said that Ageia Island was simply a tech demo. Who came up with the idea for the level, Ageia, or Grin?

Dan: Grin were the ones to suggest it, and obviously we helped them. We had worked with them on the first game, GRAW 1, and they were so happy with the hardware support with that game that they wanted to work with us again. Although the Ageia Island does show off some more advanced physics effects than can be seen in the Single Player game, it is more or less designed as a playable level with objectives and enemies with specific pathing. There’s a lot more tactics in this level because of this advanced physics. I mean, if it was designed as a tech demo, we wouldn’t have put much effort into deciding where the enemies would be positioned, or how the objectices would be placed. I think it shows that you can have a game with true physics, that is pretty good fun to play.

Whoopty: I agree, I really enjoyed shooting out the floor from underneath the tower guards, and destroying the roof struts and crushing them with the roof itself.

Dan: Exactly. You tend to find that after playing a game like this, its hard to play a game without the physics effects as you want to blow things up, and create new paths through the level.

Whoopty: One thing I must ask is why wern’t the Ageia Island effects used in the full single player game?

Dan: Well for one, it was a timing issue. To incorporate the advanced PhysX effects seen in Ageia Island, in the Single Player game would have taken much longer and in the gaming industry timing can be everything. At the moment we are aiming at increasing our customer base, and we believe when we have done so it will be more worthwhile for companies such as Grin to take a bit longer adding the advanced effects to the full single player experiences.

Whoopty: Recently the heavily PhysX based game Cell Factor: Revolution was released for free. How effective do you think it was at displaying PhysX technology?

Dan: Cell Factor was very intersting, it polarises, people seem to love it or hate it. I think a lot of the people who didn’t like it were put off by the high “minimum specifications” ordidn’t particularly like the unusual style of physics in the game. Personally, I loved the way you can fly around and move and destroy everything with your Psi Powers though I wouldn’t say it was my favourite game to play. Really, it was a bit of a learning process for us and we really just experimented with what we thought should be moveable, what should be destructable. This is a very new genre and we just wanted to see how things worked and how we could not only make the game look better through more advanced physics but what we could do to change the gameplay as well.

Whoopty: A game that is soon to be released that supports PhysX technology is Warmonger from Auto Assault maker’s Net Devil. This game is touted as making some quite revolutionary changes as to how we play through FPS games. Can you tell us how PhysX is implemented in the game and what changes it will make to our perceptions of the FPS genre?

Dan: One of the people developing Warmonger wanted to implement major physics effects in the game, because of a game he had played – I forget which one now – where you drive a 60 tonne tank, and if you hit a wire link fence you stop dead; which makes absolutely no sense. So he wanted to add a lot more realism to the game through physics, mainly in the forms of destructable environments. What Warmonger will do is redefine the “safe zones” that we have become used to in FPS games. In most games, you can be pretty safe if you hide high up, in a corner with a long ranged weapon. However, in Warmonger if you hide in a corner with a floor beneath you and someone knows you’re there, they can simply blow you up from underneath. Likewise, to stop them getting up the strais to that floor you could blow out the stairs.

Whoopty: As a side effect, this could reduce the ammount of camping in games which in some can cause major problems for game fairness.

Dan: Exactly. I mean, if you think of a game like Counterstrike, if you could destroy all the walls, where do you hide? It would take more tactics in a game like that, and it will in Warmonger. However, with such extensive destructable environments there are of course problems that arise during the developement process.

Whoopty: Like what?

Dan: Well, Adding hugely destructable environments gives developers the issue of how to contain players. In the past it was simply a case of placing an inpenetrable object such as a building, cliff face, dense forest etc. However, in a game where you can destroy almost everything, its very difficult to keep the players within a certain area without placing obvious boundaries.

Whoopty: How did they get round this problem in Warmonger?

Dan: They had to place some indestructable objects in order to create boundaries, but they’ve used subtle suggestion to make you feel like you don’t need to destroy them and therefore they shouldn’t be too noticeable. The best example I can give you is the unscaleable hills or mounds in GRAW 2; they’re similar to those. Net Devil made a lot of effort to keep the level looking as real as possible, with as subtle boundaries as they could make.

All in all though, when compared to new games that simply move the genre on in terms of graphics, Warmonger will be a completely new experience for players.

Whoopty: Now, Unreal 3 is undoubtedly one of the biggest game releases this year. It has been said that PhysX has been encorporated in the game, but they are keeping things very hush. What can you tell us?

Dan: Hah, well the problem with that is it’s Epic’s Game so I can’t really say much without them giving the go ahead I am afraid. They should be releasing some information this soon though.

Whoopty: Fair enough Dan. Can you tell us about any other games Ageia will be supporting this year?

Dan: We’re looking at a few. I’m afraid I can’t talk about many of them but I can say that there are several UE3 based games that will be supporting PhysX and we are targetting the licencees of the engine since we know that graphically, those games will be fantastic and we think they could be just that bit better with Ageia PhysX support.

We are also working with some other companies using other engines and some independant engines but I’m afraid I can’t really talk about them much, though I will say that they are a healthy mix of European and USA based developers.

Whoopty: In terms of the hardware, when do you think we will see PCI-E PhysX cards and will they offer a performance increase over the current PCI based PhysX cards?

Dan: Two things, yes we are working on the hardware and early next year we will start to see more things emerging on this front. However, currently we are very happy with the performance of the PhysX card we have at the moment. Even in the most physics intensive games we are still only utilising about 60% of the PPU’s power, so we still have quite a bit of headroom before we have to worry about increasing the card’s performance. That doesn’t mean we arn’t working on future solutions, but basically at the moment there is no need for a faster card.

Whoopty: I read somewhere that at some point we might be able to overclock the PhysX PPU. Is this something we can expect to see in the future?

Dan: Haha, I’ll admit that’s actually the first I’ve head of that. I mean, there’s no reason why that couldn’t be encorporated in the future, but as I said before, there isn’t really any need to increase the power of the card at the moment so it’s not something we plan to implement any time soon.

Whoopty: What do you think t
e future or Ageia and the PhysX PPU are? Perhaps an onboard chip?

Dan: Let’s just say that we are working very closely on new form factors. We’ve been very successful in increasing our userbase recently and have gained a lot of support from lots of large OEMs such as: Acer, Dell and let’s say we are putting a lot of thought into new form factors. So, yes, we will be showing that it’s not only possible to use PhysX with an add-in card; you’re idea of an onboard chip would be an ideal solution, let’s put it that way.

Whoopty: Ok Dan, well thank you for this interview. It looks like we have some interesting things to come from Ageia in the future.

Dan: No problem Jon.

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