[runawayprisoner]

Originally Posted by cottonvibes

so either your CPU is going to be expensive, or your GFX card is going to be expensive...

Nah, more like... your GFX card is ALWAYS going to be expensive, and pay for your CPU at your own risk. I mean... who among us did not pay at least $200 for his high-end graphics card? Anyone?

price is irrelevant, as either way, its going to be expensive.

It's another issue you need to take into account, if you are to analyze this situation to its fullest potential. I mean... we are talking about the benefits and losses of dual-core and quad-core, or octo-core processors, not just about multi-threading technology?

and another reason its better to have an 8 cored-processor vs GPU-based physics is because the extra cores don't have to be used specifically for physics, whereas having the GPU preform physics calculations would limit it's power specifically for physics.

Indeed, but what else do you need to use the processors for? Mmm? Because in a game, it's either A.I., or physics, and A.I. doesn't need more than a dual-core processor for some crazy conditional branches.

you won't be transfering GBs of data

Really now? Because coordinates are stored in floating point precision values, or better yet, double floating point precision values. Only the graphics card can determine where the particles are in the space. Up to 1000 particles with each coordinates stored as floating point precision values, and their other parameters to identify them as particle objects in the game, as well as their lighting coordinates and a whole slew of other values ought to take up at least 1MB each. That's almost 1GB for 1000 particles. Realistically, a matrix would be best, but since our processors don't have that big a cache, they are going to have to store everything into RAM, which means... the GPU has to read everything from RAM to its own integrated memory units, which is way slower than direct CPU -> GPU transfer. You can send coordinates on the fly if the processors are fast enough, but if not, latency is going to waste bandwidth, and/or bog bandwidth, causing tremendous delays.

if there was that much data being transformed, it would be slow regardless.

Yeah, hence why a monstrous processor dedicated only to calculate is better than 4 processors dedicated to doing a lot of other things.

and data still has to be transfered within the GPU as well...
The GPU has its own Bus to transfer information between it's processors and memory.
its faster than from CPU -> GPU, but its still not instantaneous.

It's not just faster than from CPU -> GPU, it's significantly faster. PCI-E x16 bandwidth is obviously at most half that of the transfer rate between the GPU and the integrated memory units. Actually, it's up to about 4x faster than PCI-E x16 with GDDR4.

and a physics processor would be faster than a general-purpose processor at physics, but thats all it would be good for.

And again, what do you need that many processors for? Do you play Crysis while encoding and watching a BD movie at the same time? Or do you also include PCSX2 into the bunch? That's the only way I can see a typical user using an 8-core processor. Quite honestly, with a quad-core, I can already play PCSX2 while watching and encoding a BD movie. It's uncanny how people just keep upgrading blindly, without knowing how much they need. This is why I have a business, too. I advise people and address what they need. I don't just blindly sell a computer for a high price.