Via X-bit Labs: "Gabe Newell, the chief of Valve Software game developer, said in an interview that he still considers Ageia PhysX and Sony PlayStation 3 as two inadequate products. Besides, the head of software maker that creates popular Half-Life 2 and Counter Strike titles reiterated commitment to multi-core central processing units as well as general purpose GPU computing, such as physics or artificial intelligence.

“[With the introduction of multi-core CPUs] performance and scaling has stopped being a hardware problem and instead it’s been turned into a software problem. That’s bad news for us, software guys – but for hardware it’s good news, because it shifts the value proposition towards software developers. What it also means is clock rates will stay pretty much the same, but the number of execution units you have is going to explode. The good news is that we’re going to spend an era of growing linearly for a while, so transistor budgets will translate directly to improvements,” said Mr. Newell in an interview with Next Generation web-site.

Currently central processing units (CPUs) have up to four processing engines, whereas graphics processing units (GPUs) can feature tens or even hundreds of execution engines, meaning that GPUs are better prepared to the new programming paradigm, which involves tens and hundreds of threads. Still, considering that Intel Corp. can is working on high-performance microprocessors with eight and more engines, application-specific accelerators and other ways to improve their capabilities, Valve still does not make any final judgments whether general purpose computing on GPUs or CPUs will take the lead eventually."


When it comes to PhysX I myself was never totally sold.  The main problem being that it never really had a chance to become a necessity and popular before the rise of multicores.  Had UT3 been out last year, and other games taking advantage of it before everyone made the jump to AM2 and Core 2 Duo it may have become more popular.  Of course much of the physics in a game can be off loaded to other cores, as it seems Valve is doing on Episode 2.  It all looks pretty, but until there is a killer app, its just not going to sell.

As far as the PS3, programing for it may not be a piece of cake, but by no means is it on par with PhysX yet in this writers opinion.  There are too many killer titles on the way, so obviously some people code for it just fine.  Plus you toss in a fully functional Blu-Ray player and its still a very popular choice.

How likely are you to buy a PhysX card by the end of the year?

UT3... How can I resist?

Very Likely

Somewhat Likely

Not Likely

I need to see the game myself first

Source @ X-bit Labs