Here's a short article on wiki with some external links for the wiki haters out there: clicky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_processor)

There are some specs for a PPU on this page: click me (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX)

My question is:
Is it useful or is it just a bag of hot air?
Does anyone have one of these and if so, is it worth coughing up about $300 for?

Is it useful or is it just a bag of hot air?
Does anyone have one of these and if so, is it worth coughing up about $300 for?

Sounds like selling hot sand in the Sahara Desert to me, as it is now. I haven't played any games where world physics have appeared to be a bottleneck on performance, and it would be financial suicide for any game developer to release a game requiring such hardware as it is now since so few potential customers have it.

I wouldn't buy such a card separately, sooner or later it will become built into the gamer graphics cards if it really becomes a performance issue. :)

Not sure about these, as with my dual GPU I haven't found such a thing necessary.

Still, if Asus and BFG are on board, it cant entirely be a hoax... maybe its something to support lower end cards, saving you from robbing a bank and getting a 7950GX2 or X1900X :p These are great cards, but the reality is, they cost as much as most users pay for their entire system :(

Lets hope the AMD CnGPUs will make such monstrosities a thing of the past

mtfbwya

Still doesn't make much sense to me lol, cause they're not exactly cheap either...

Some people will buy anything...even purchase real estate on the moon (http://usa.lunarregistry.com/) :giveup: Right now, this thing looks totally useless to me.

Right now, this thing looks totally useless to me.
It probably is for now, but it won't stay that way for long. I think I remember seeing that future M/B designs will incorporate a third PCIe x16 slot so that PPU's can be used along with SLI or XFire. Yet another excuse to drive up the cost of a good gaming PC, I guess. :mad:

I thought it might have something to do with that DMM thing Lucasarts is releasing, but maybe I'm just totally off here...

Well I'll bet video game physics will be cool in the future, but I don't really see the point of having an entire card to do calculations for it. I mean, physics in today's games look pretty realistic enough, how much "better" will they get?

In my opinion, it looks like just another reason for corporations to rake in the moolah. :(

(Besides, only evil Sony is using them currently, right?)

One of my friends told me about this, I didn't really get what the point was...

While I'm late to this show here is my take on the subject. The usage of a dedicated PPU is much the same as a person going out and buying a computer with a dual processor. The difference is when it comes to a PPU you are getting something for one purpose and that is gaming.

Now much of the calculations for graphics and animations that a PPU would handle are far from even being in modern games for either a PC or console. The key reason for this is because that even with advancements in technology there is alot that gets left out in even in the most inovative games because the average gaming PC can't even take advantage of the features.