innervision311

I've been reading a lot about the latest DX10 videocards and I'm sure you all know they've dropped the "pixel/vertex shaders" and made completely flexible...well I forget the term they used...but basically there are 128 "shaders or anything else you need" on the videocards.

In the past the pixel shaders were limited to shading pixels and same for the vertex shaders. With that design it was a guarantee that you always had power you weren't using. Now they've gone with unified shaders which mean they can shade anything.

However they're not using the term shaders anymore because if all of them aren't being used, they will be used to process physics which will take a big load off the CPU.

So it looks like the physics cards are actually going to go the way of the dinosaur because who wants to drop $500 on a video card then another $300 on a card that probably won't have any affect because the video card will already be taking care of it? Either that or they need to drop the price on them to about $50-70 because that's the only way anyone will ever buy one once they have a DX10 videocard.

Either way, we the gamers win

IGemini

Well, AGEIA cards are more like $200, but yeah. It was a nice idea up until nVidia came out with the 8800 series, which is 4x faster than the old DX9 stuff, and now we're waiting for ATI's DX10 cards. But it would be interesting to see how much raw visual power an SLI 8800GTX setup with a PhysX processor would be.

2point4

My guess would be a ton. The G80 GPU is as powerful and as programmable as any CPU on the market today. The only problems it's facing are 1) heat and 2)size. Once they get these two issues resolved, they'll probably start moving into the CPU market.

But anyway, I was thinking about upgrading to a 7 series NVIDIA soon, but since I've been reading all this magical stuff about the G80, I'm thinking I'm gonna have to wait until the price drops a bit and just skip the 7 series all together.