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PU—is that Jon’s dream machine?
By Jon Peddie
I just spent three exciting days at the
Game Developer Conference in San Francisco. I got to see many things that were
publicly available and a few that were being shown privately and not quite
ready to go public. We are in for the time of our lives.
Nvidia can be credited
with bringing the notion of cinematic effects to computer games. Whether or not
it was realized, Nvidia certainly introduced the concept and the terminology,
and it has since been copied and exploited by others. Beautiful pictures and games
in real time, realistically rendered, are now something that we can almost take
for granted. True, they are getting better at regeneration, and true, we’ll
never really be totally finished, but they are so good right now that they give
us lots of pleasure.
Creative Labs and
Logitech gave us great 5.1 sound systems, as did several other hardware
companies. Game developers have embraced that, and some of them have even
extended to 7.1 sound, so the sound effects and our cinematic-like effects are
approaching what we might experience in a high-class theater. Interactively, we
have faster mice and we have a keyboard design for game playing, we have
gaming console controller-like controllers for the PC, and we even have
headsets for stereo vision.
But yet there is more,
and I want more. Based on the things I saw at GDC and know are coming, I can
now project Jon’s dream machine for game play. Jon’s dream machine is, of
course, a PC, not a game console, because those are closed architectural
systems and you get what you get. PCs allow you to add stuff to them and
enhance them and build it out as technology grows.
To begin with Jon’s dream
machine will have multiple CPUs, in the form of dual cores or quad cores—it
doesn’t really matter. But there will be a minimum of two CPUs, and the games
that Jon chooses to play will be highly multi-threaded to take advantage of
these multiple processors.
Of course, Jon’s dream
machine will have a minimum of 2 GBytes of high-speed DDR2 or 3, system RAM,
and a trillion bytes of hard disk storage, and it will have two graphics
boards. If the machine was built today it would have two Nvidia G80 boards in
an SLI configuration. If the machine were to be built in a couple of months it
might have two Radeon R600 boards, depending on how good they turn out to be.
The output of those graphics boards, of course, would be sent to a Dell 30-inch
2580 x 1600 display.
So that’s most of the
hardware. The games, however, are another thing.
First off, I want a game
that uses Natural Motion’s software for the characters. If you haven’t seen the
demos at a show, then go to their website and be amazed (www.naturalmotion.com/downloads.htm). Once there you
will get an idea of how a character can actually look inside a game. These
characters are algorithmically drawn stick figures that are not moved around
like puppets. Instead, they behave in a very humanistic and independent way,
even to the point where if something is attacking them they will try to protect
themselves. The idea of “natural” in the realization of the software and the
title is very appropriate.
Next, of course, I want a
totally destructible world so that when we shoot our blasters or get thrown
against a wall or pushed into a box or something falls from the ceiling on us,
I want those things to be deformable and destroyable. I want to be able to roll
them up, set them on fire, cast a spell on them, or make them spin forever into
infinity. So we have to have a physics accelerator. It could be the graphics
board that we don’t want anymore (assuming that there is a slot on the
motherboard for a third graphics boards), or it could be Ageia’s physics
accelerator board.
And I get lonely so I
want friends with me, and enemies against me, lots of them, and I want them to
be smart and not just rag dolls and dumb multiple stampings. When my companions
fire, I want them to hit something, and when my enemies come I want them to
move around obstacles and duck and run away if necessary. And to do that I want
a separate AI accelerator like AIseek’s. If you’d like to get a taste for such
smart behavior take a look at these demos: http://www.aiseek.com/Demos.html.
I don’t want to run
physics or AI on the CPU or the GPU, or the audio processor. I want powerful
application-specific processors
So my dream machine has
five PUs: CPU for the applications, GPU for the graphics, AIPU for the AI, PPU
for the physics, and APU for the audio. But most of all, it has games that
exploit all those PUs, What d’ya think? That doesn’t stink, does it? 
