nV News has conducted an interesting interview with Epic Games CEO & Lead Programmer Tim Sweeney talking about Ageia's PhysX and Havok's Havok FX physics acceleration technologies, among other topics. Sweeney sheds some light on the PhysX implementation in the upcoming Unreal Tournament 2007, which is one of the biggest games on Ageia's list of PhysX-supporting titles.

Jacob - How will UT2007 use Ageia enhanced physics effects? Increased object count? Fluid effects?

Tim Sweeney - Anywhere from explosions to have physically interacating particles... we are also looking at fluid effects to see where we can use those, gee, blood spurts sound like they might be a good candidate! Alot of other special effects like that, where they dont affect the core gameplay, so that players with the physics hardware and players without the physcs hardware can all play together without any restrictions

Jacob- Havok recently announced the ability to accelerate physics on the GPU. Is that necessarily a bad idea?

Tim Sweeney- Thats a good approach, they have some good technology there. Havok has a physics system that runs largely on the GPU to accelerate the computations there. It seems to be a lower precision physics than you have for the rest of the game which is problematic. You really want all the physics in the world to be drawing with a constant level of precision, so you don't have to make weird trade-offs there. I guess there is also the trade-off with that, if your GPU is doing both physics and graphics, then you are not getting the full utilization out of the system.

Jacob- This isn't really a UT2007 question this is more a UE3 question; Do you guys have any plans to add DX10 features to UE3?

Tim Sweeney: Oh yea absolutely, we will have full support for DX10, we will use their geometry shader stuff to accelerate shadow generation and other techiniques in the engine, we will be using virtual texturing. With both UT2K7 and Gears of War we are offering our textures at extremely high resolution like 2000x2000 resolution which is a higher resolution than you can effectively use on a console because of the limited memory, but it is something that certainly will be appropiate for PC's with virtualized texturing in the future, so we will whole heartly be supporting DX10. Its hard to say what the timeframe will be on that because Vista could ship this year, or next year, or whatever. But, we will certainly be supporting it really well when it comes along.

He does make a few interesting speculations about the future of GPU/CPU/PPU development As you get CPUs with 4+ cores you can start thinking about dedicating a couple of them to specialized ops. If PPU style operations are more generally applicable (a kind of super-SIMD for FP ops) you could imagine a core designed to do that for running those threads in games or image processing apps or whatever....