The next revolution in PC gaming:

[ArgonV]

This will blow your friggin minds! Think about it... What could the OpenPlane engine accomplish with this under the hood:

Ageia Physics

This could mean the real time ripping of canvas on wings, destructable terrain all the way around, true damage models for aircraft and vehicles (Real time bending of metal) waves that are not only 3d but are capable of the real life motion and behavior of water currents!

Also check this out: Ageia and Ubisoft

Battle of Britain by Oleg Maddox is in the works, could this be a clue as to what's to come?!?!
_________________
'Go Fly A Kite!'
-Jason R.
FS-WWI Project Leader

FS-WWI Plane Pack Site

[DDT]

Heard about that in the Sty. Sounds really cool.

BTW - "blow your minds", is that taking "giving head" to a whole new level?
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BlitzPig_DDT on HL (and at Ubi, and at the blitzpig.com forum)

[Blind_Faith]

That sounds like something alright...

[ArgonV]

Most people don't realize that current CPU designs and materials have nearly reached their lifecycle. It's becoming harder and harder to squeeze the juice out of current CPU technology while keeping the cooling and costs down. Alternatives have to be found! Hence the dual CPUs, SLI graphics cards and the huge amount of cache increases and leap to 64-bit computing that we've seen lately along with new memory technology (DDR2 and DDR3 anybody?) and of course SATA hard drives. We will be seeing more and more multi-PU environments in the future, where you have one PU dedicated to each large piece of what makes up a program (graphics, physics, and of course the basic code, OS, I/O interactions)

This is NOT marketed to the average PC user, who could care less about hi-fidelity physics when all they want is a fast internet connection with word processing and streaming media. But for those of us who spend the cash on the latest and greatest hardware, this will be the shiznit! Consoles will surely reap the huge amount of benefits this has to offer, making games not only more eye-candy, but more believable and realistic in terms of how you and the virtual world interact. Motherboard and card manufactures already have started to plan on how to merge these technologies together, and to get them to the consumer in the most cost effective and efficient way.

Believe me guys, I have seen this new technology in action and it is no less short of AMAZING on what level this will increase virtual gaming.

See this article explaining more of what's to come:

http://interviews.teamxbox.com/xbox/1117/AGEIA-Technologies-Interview/p1
_________________
'Go Fly A Kite!'
-Jason R.
FS-WWI Project Leader

FS-WWI Plane Pack Site

[PV]

Attentive observers will already have noticed that Moore's Law started breaking down about a year ago. Intel's most recent, or rather, last orthodox run of prototypes turned out to be incapable of running at their target speed: the feature step size and the heat generated didn't get along too well. It's been a great forty year run, but unless someone does something really clever, it's finally time to start shifting development efforts sideways into other tricks other than simply smaller faster dies.

Parallel architecture has been around for decades, and dedicated parallel chips, the InMOS Transputers, were being produced since the mid-eighties, but the orthodox architecture foundries could always match their performance six months later with help from Moore's Law. And the biggest hurtle for parallel chips was and is that programmers hate them; it is far far more difficult to write intelligent and efficient code to execute on multiple machines, where things are constantly waiting on other results, or trying to mesh with parallel results. There will have to be a whole culture of parallel coders develop, with fluency in the techniques, and perhaps we will see a revival of Occam, the parallel language used by the InMOS machines, or some new variant thereof.

Meanwhile, the foundries are casting about for alternative technologies to rescue single CPU computing, mostly involving the incorporation of optical devices into chips to cut current and increase speed. There are two good articles in last November's SciAm on this. I don't see this coming on line soon, though.