John Carmack reckons PhysX is useless

Posted at: 12:00am 19th July 2007 by Ben Hardwidge

Doom creator reckons that GPUs and multi-core CPUs will do good enough job anyway

Co-creator of Wolfenstein, Doom and Doom 3, John Carmack, has put a firm boot into the face of Ageia’s PhysX chip, saying that ‘I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs.’

Carmack was interviewed by Boot Daily for a piece on Intel’s Core 2 QX6850 chip, where the godfather of the first person shooter genre said that that GPUs and multi-core CPUs will be able to do all the work needed for physics in future games.

‘Multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general,’ said Carmack, ‘but when GPUs finally get reasonably fine grained context switching and scheduling, some tasks will work well there.’

We had high hopes for Ageia’s PhysX PPU (physics processing unit) when it was first announced, but over a year later the supporting games catalogue has managed to be even more disappointing than Doom 3. Unless you want (non-persistent) debris coming from explosions in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter or a cloth flag and oil spills in CellFactor, then a PhysX card is pretty useless at the moment.

That said, it will be supported by the Unreal 3 engine, which could make a difference to the PhysX chip’s popularity if it adds something new to games based on the engine.

Via The Inquirer