Mon Dec 08, 2008 1:09 pm EST

Vick spent $3.6 million in three months before going to jail
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According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former Atlanta Falcons quarterback Michael Vick went on a spending spree in the months leading up to being jailed for dog fighting.

The day he went to jail, Michael Vick bought a $99,000 Mercedes. He cashed four checks that totaled $24,900. He gave $28,000 to the mother of his oldest child. He paid a public relations firm $23,000 and gave a friend $16,000. Altogether on Nov. 19, 2007, Vick spent $201,840. But for the former Atlanta Falcons quarterback, the day was most remarkable for how it ended: behind bars, beginning what would be a nearly two-year sentence in a notorious dogfighting case.

The day’s spending, in fact, was but a small part of the $18.2 million that flew out of Vick’s hands from 2006 to 2008, according to documents filed recently in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Norfolk, Va. Nearing the end of his time in federal prison, Vick, 28, is seeking the court’s protection from his creditors.

They are particularly interested in his increased spending in the three months before he reported for jail.

The documents provide a detailed look at the privileged lifestyle of an athlete who rarely offered more than a glimpse of himself off the playing field. They show how Vick, who grew up poor in Newport News, Va., bought houses and cars, farms and horses, boats and jewelry, all at the height of a spectacular career that shattered after he was identified as the key figure in an illegal dogfighting ring.

Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.

Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left.

Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss.

“He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it’s all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America.

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic

Electronic Arts and Take-Two Interactive Software will adopt Nvidia’s PhysX technology, bringing more realistic gaming to the PC.

The largest graphics chip supplier is announcing on Monday that Electronic Arts and Take-Two have licensed its PhysX technology as a development platform.

“PhysX is a great physics solution for the most popular platforms, and we’re happy to make it available for EA’s development teams worldwide,” said Tim Wilson, Chief Technology Officer of EA’s Redwood Shores Studio in a statement.

“We are very impressed with the quality of the PhysX engine and we licensed it so our studios can use this solution early in development,” said Jacob Hawley, technology director for 2K, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, also in a statement.

Nvidia got its physics technology–which is trademarked as PhysX–when it acquired Ageia in February. PhysX runs on the graphics processing unit, or GPU. Intel and AMD, on the other hand, have been promoting technology that is executed on the central processing unit or CPU. Intel’s approach uses technology from Havok, a developer of a physics engine, that Intel bought in September of 2007.

Based on the laws of physics, the goal of Nvidia’s technology is to make game objects respond in a realistic way to physical events. More conventional technology uses a canned response, in which the same response is repeated over and over. For example, a window breaks or a person falls the same way every time. In a PhysX-enabled football sports game, however, the angle and velocity of the impact is calculated by the GPU to generate a real-time response that is different every time.

The technology was meant to run on the GPU, according to Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research, a firm that tracks developments in the graphics chip industry. “It’s a GPU thing and the fact that EA and Take Two are coming out (with support) gives you a clue why,” said Peddie. “This really is a significant event. Going forward and enabling the GPU to do physics,” he said.

Ageia’s secret sauce is its physics libraries, which are supported on the Xbox, Playstation 3, Wii, as well as the CPU and Ageia’s own PPU (Physics Processing Unit), said Ujesh Desai, VP of Product Marketing at Nvidia, in an interview last week. “It’s a very open platform. Something game developers really liked, which is why a lot of game developers adopted it,” he said.

The launch pad for Ageia on the PC is Nvidia’s CUDA architecture. CUDA already has a large installed base of GPUs that can run a C program. “Which is what PhysX is,” Desai said. “We bought Ageia, they ported their PhsyX API to our GPU using our C compiler on top of CUDA. So now there are 100 million GeForce (chips) out there that can now do PhysX processing,” he said.

And PhysX-enabled games will offer much greater realism. “Today the way they do sports games is motion capture. They capture the different animation–running, falling. What you realize is that for the first five to ten minutes of the game (or movie) it looks believable but after you play for a while, you realize, wait a minute, every time he falls, he falls the same way. Every time I make that tackle it looks the same,” said Desai.

The game Backbreaker uses PhysX. “They’re calculating those tackles in real time based on how the body interacts and the body mechanics interact. So no two tackles are the same,” according to Nvidia’s Desai. Another game, Mirror’s Edge, is coming out in January from a company called Dice. The PC version will have PhysX in it, according to Desai.

“Ageia changed the rules on this,” Peddie said. “It’s much, much more realistic.”

Ageia’s physics was originally done on an Ageia Physics Processing Unit, Peddie said. “This was the only way to make it work. But now this capability (software) has been ported to Nvidia GPUs and this can be done on Nvidia silicon,” he said.

Ujesh Desai, VP of product marketing at Nvidia, discusses physics strategy

(Credit: Brooke Crothers)Physics can also be used to make things look more photorealistic. “In today’s games, cloth and hair look very fake. Because you don’t have the right physical properties,” Desai said. This will change with PhysX, according to Desai. “All these things can be physically simulated.”

Havok–the company Intel acquired–was the first to introduce physics into games and bring out a physics library. Havok’s physics has been run on the CPU in a time-scheduled way, Peddie said. “Because of that, there weren’t many CPU resources to really do a great job on the physics,” he said. “Nothing would really happen. What happened at most is that you would hit this thing (a window or a wall, for example) and it would apply a decal to indicate that there was some change in it. It’s not very realistic,” he said.

AMD, for its part, will pursue a balanced platform. “The GPU is a great place to do processing. We’ll do the off-loading (to the GPU) where it makes sense,” said Korhan Erenben, product marketing manager, AMD Graphics Products Group. “(But) we are aligned with Havok in terms of working on a future direction of physics. Right now it is on the CPU and we think that serves the broad installed base. Taking it to the next step would be to have a capability on the GPU–where and when it makes sense,” he said.

Physics is better on GPUs

Peddie explained why physics is more suited for the GPU than the CPU. GPUs today typically have hundreds of processors that are good at doing many things in parallel. “If you have threads or processes that can be run simultaneously. If you have processors available to deal with each one of those threads, then you can get your results a lot sooner,” he said.

He described a technique called Same Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD). “The same instruction is the physics equation. Things fall toward earth all the time. And the multiple data will be what the things are. It might be a rock, might be a person, might be the wheel of a car. You have to be able to process this stuff and have it behave in a realistic fashion. To do that, you have to process it very quickly,” he explained.

“The advantage that GPUs bring is that they have this humongous number of processors. Certainly as good as the (Intel) 486 ever was. So they’re really good processors and you’ve got hundreds of them literally inside the GPU.”

There will be challenges for users, however. “The tricky part is, why would I want to take one graphics card and spend $500 on it and then not use it for graphics bur rather use it for physics? The answer is of course I wouldn’t,” he said. He suggested that a gamer might use the really good card for physics and employ the old card “that you got last year” for graphics, assuming that there are enough slots in the PC.