GPU physics for the masses - NVIDIA's PhysX Pack 1 @ Elite Bastards

[news 28]

 

Hi everyone,

 

After years of hearing copious amounts of spin and information about the advantages of calculating physics on the GPU over the CPU, NVIDIA's purchase of AGEIA in February of this year finally looked likely to give rise to some movement in this direction. Indeed, that's exactly what's happened, with the graphics giant quickly porting their acquired PhysX capabilities to supporting GeForce graphics boards.

 

Next week will see the launch of NVIDIA's "PhysX pack 1", offering users the ability to enjoy some of the goodies surrounding GPU-based PhysX for themselves. In advance of that however, we've been able to spend some time playing with NVIDIA's latest PhysX-capable drivers, as well as a handful of both existing and as-yet unreleased game titles, to see if GPU-based physics can live up to the hype.

 

 

GPU physics for the masses - NVIDIA's PhysX Pack 1

 

"In a certain sense, adding PhysX to a game title doesn't need to be implemented specifically for the CPU or GPU from a developer point of view, it's simply handled by the PhysX driver's HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer), which can then pass on commands to the CPU, GPU or PhysX PPU. Of course, life isn't quite that simple because of the performance disparity between those three hardware platforms we mentioned just now - If you fill your game up with a massive amount of physics to make use of a high-end GeForce GPU's processing capabilities, then your game will crawl for anyone using the CPU for PhysX acceleration, whereas conversely only using a small amount of in-game physics effects to target CPU acceleration will lessen the effect in-game and mean that a GeForce GPU has virtually nothing to do."

 

http://www.elitebastards.com/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=599&Itemid=29

 

 

As always, a news post on your site would be hugely appreciated, and we guarantee to reciprocate by posting any news items received from yourselves. Many thanks!

 

Regards,

Hanners

Elite Bastards

 

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