Wii features Ageia PhysX chip?

[dvdmike]

you bought a ppu? nice one.. I guess

I dont have one any more forget that it was a pos 2x8800gtx are on the shopping list now

[Mofoman]

I dont have one any more forget that it was a pos 2x8800gtx are on the shopping list now

Yeah the 8800 GTX is on my shopping list for Xmas too!

Now back on topic, it wasn't that long ago people were saying the wii couldn't do physics because of it's spec.It's pleasantly surprising that it can handle a complex engine like this and bodes very well for the future if launch games are using complex code like this.This must be the reason they have toned down Rs's visuals a little, but isn't it a great compromise to now have true physics in a fps for the wii?

[kernow]

2 gf 8800's? woah , you must have a lot of cash to blow

I can't do that with gfx cards any more, before you know it the next ones out and killing your SLI setup

[vertigo]

thres no blood in this game

Interesting. Presumably done specifically to avoid the M or AO rating, rather than at Nintendo's request?
I still think swording someone up regardless of whether there's your actual blood there is enough for an M, or perhaps there should just be a 15 rating which sounds about right.
I don't get all that crap, guess it's based on US movie ratings, but the old UK way of U, PG, 15, 18 seemed sensible to me.
Does this game contain mild peril?

[eastyy]

think the game city of villians also uses the physX chip for the pc aswell

A waste of money in my opinion though

from what i can gather there was a demo that supposedly only worked with the physx card but there was a command line work around turned out the different was hardly noticeable (a few fancier water effects and some better cloth physics).

Perhaps though in a console that only plays games it might have more affect though

[Ajay1986]

The actual unit is pointless in most PC's, as there is a pretty large performance hit when it is used.

However i would like to know how PhysX compares to the new Havok engine, which is looking very impressive.

[vertigo]

true physics

Well... physics bodged in such a way as to look believably realistic you mean. That goes for all game physics stuff, not just Red Steel btw.
I can't help but look at everything between Red Faction and Half Life 2 and wince at the 'physics' which look so damn fake. Physics is the new rag-doll is the new bump-mapping is the new realtime lighting is the new lens flare. You know?

[Byg]

Now back on topic, it wasn't that long ago people were saying the wii couldn't do physics because of it's spec.It's pleasantly surprising that it can handle a complex engine like this and bodes very well for the future if launch games are using complex code like this.This must be the reason they have toned down Rs's visuals a little, but isn't it a great compromise to now have true physics in a fps for the wii?

They can probably choose which physics bits of the engine to use, so they may not even be using the more processor intensive stuff. In addition, dev-houses don't even need an established engine such as this to 'do physics' as they may already have their own in-house physics engine. The people saying the Wii can't do physics is analagous to all the hoo-har with the PS2 emotion chip and saying it can 'do emotions'.

[elkatas]

BTW, this is quote from this year's E3 where IGN's Mark Bozon interviewed Elebit's designer Shingo Mukaitoge:

GN: Is the hardware as easy to use on the Wii as it was with the GameCube? The two systems are very similar is structure we're told.

Konami: Yes, the structure is very similar to GameCube, but you already knew that. The development was not that difficult, as the Wii system has built in physics simulation. That helped the process.

This quite is main reason why I posted this thread originally. Ijust thought it was weally weird way to paraphrase that game uses physics middleware, and thought that maybe it is possible that Wii really does feature physics chip.

http://wii.ign.com/articles/708/708155p1.html

[angelx]

I did kind of skim over an article on this physics chip by some professor of something or other who said that this kind of processor is nowhere near "true physics" :P even still, could be fun.

[Pirotic]

interesting, I wouldn't be too surprised if they did have some hardware chip just to keep tabs on the controller position and state, but a physics chip for in-game? not much point when the GPU couldn't even render half of it.

[MattyD]

With a controller that lends itself to grabbing and manipulating things in-game, be it fishing in Zelda or shaking stuff in Elebits, surely it makes sense to incorporate some physics routines into the hardware even if it's not a full-blown PPU? It's just like putting lighting and shading into your video chipset, it saves both the developers and the CPU a lot of maths work.