ATI Claims No Physics for "9 to 12 Months"

[Kougar]

ATI's physics goes on the back burner

During ATI's 2006 third quarter financial results conference call this morning, ATI CEO Dave Orton revealed to analysts that despite demonstrating physics processing earlier this year, actual retail availability will not be available for another "9 to 12 months." Orton indicated that the technology was still undergoing testing and preparation. Interestingly, ATI indicated earlier that its physics technology was already on the market and needed only driver updates.

DailyTech has attempted to test some physics-enabled demos on a pair of Radeon X1900 XTX boards but drivers were not ready. Interestingly, ATI demonstrated physics on its RD600 chipset at Computex earlier this year but a year from now, ATI's RD600 will more than likely be phased out. In fact, ATI said during the call that it was already developing and testing RD700, its next generation core logic.

Full article is at http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3092 (http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=3092)

[Kougar]

Article has been updated/fixed:

Update 06/30/2006: We earlier reported that "retail availability" was not to be available for 9-12 months. Instead, Orton's exact meaning was for "volume availability," and as such DailyTech has changed the article text. Will Willis, Senior PR manager for ATI sent us the following comment about ATI's physics solution:

Dave’s reply was that we won’t see physics in volume (i.e. hundreds of thousands of cards being used for physics) and therefore a material revenue stream from physics for 9-12 months (i.e. another 3-4 quarters) as that’s when there will be some substantial volume of ATI graphics cards being used for physics purposes.

ATI GPU’s that support physics acceleration are already in retail (i.e. the X1900 and X1600 series of cards for example). All that’s required is a driver update that enables physics processing, and more importantly, game content which we expect around the holidays. We’re very likely to see revenue from physics before 9-12 months, but as Dave said it won’t be in volume, it will likely be early adopters.

Willis claims content for ATI physics will be available this holiday season already. However, there is no word yet on the driver other than it is "several weeks out."

[werty316]

No big deal if it is delaed since there are no killer apps for physics cards.