Carmack nails lid on PPU coffin

JOHN CARMACK appears to have put another nail in the coffin of dedicated physics add-in cards by suggesting that he doesn't believe they really add anything to a system that multi-core CPUs can't also do.

Speaking to BootDaily, Carmack said, "I am not a believer in dedicated PPUs. Multiple CPU cores will be much more useful in general, but when GPUs finally get reasonably fine grained context switching and scheduling, some tasks will work well there."

Carmack, like Intel, Nvidia and DAAMIT, appears to think that using GPU and CPU capacity to handle this stuff is a much better idea than requiring an extra add-in card. Indeed, upcoming Valve title Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and Crytek's Crysis both do advanced physics calculations across CPU cores, and Carmack's decision to go the same way may tip the scales.

In contrast, Unreal Engine 3 uses PPU hardware, but there are still scant details on how, exactly.

Currently, PPU owners can enjoy Ghost Recon 2 in its fancy-physics glory, but that's about it. How long can Aegia wait for UE3 to save the day? µ