PurSuiT Posted March 20, 2006 Share Posted March 20, 2006 Havok FX "NVIDIA and Havok will be demonstrating a physics effects solution that runs completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU)" Havok FX, GPUs can simulate the interactions of thousands of colliding rigid bodies, a fundamental technique of physics computation seen in today's latest games. It's now possible to compute the components of friction, collisions, gravity, mass, and velocity that form the basis of rigid body physics. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted March 20, 2006 Share Posted March 20, 2006 Nvidia announces SLI-accelerated physics "In October of last year, ATI discussed the opportunity to use the massive floating point computation power of a graphics processor to enable accelerated physics - but Nvidia is first to introduce the feature to the market: Called "SLI Physics," the feature will offloads physics calculations from the CPU to the graphics processor and promises to bring movie-type effects from crashing cars and speeding bullets to the PC screen - all with smooth frame rates. A new software driver for Nvidia's graphics cards will use the second graphics processor to enable the feature in future games." NVIDIA SLI Physics Tech Preview "While a separate add-in-card containing a dedicated processor is one option, there is another option that may already be in your computer, your video card. This idea isn’t actually new. There has been a big push since programmable GPUs have evolved to use them for other tasks. With their programmable nature they are capable of doing more than just 3D rendering. We know they can render 3D many times faster than a CPU, which is how we get such beautiful graphics in our games, so what if we used that power that is sitting there to do more than just 3D. That is what NVIDIA and actually ATI as well are proposing. If you read our ATI X1000 family evaluation, check out this page where we are talking about this very same idea. ATI also sees the benefit in using GPUs as dedicated processors for other tasks, like physics. What differs today with this technology preview is that this has gone from idea to implementation as NVIDIA has developed a working GPU physics engine solution with Havok." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PurSuiT Posted March 21, 2006 Author Share Posted March 21, 2006 Nvidia SLI physics is a fat pipe dream "NVIDIA PUT OUT a bunch of slideware about SLI physics the other day, and on the surface it looks pretty neat, Ageia-like physics modelling on cards you already own? Wow, sounds too good to be true, and sadly, that's because it is." "What is being billed as a huge advance in physics looks to be more of an advance in physics based eye candy, not the real deal. It costs a GPU, and no one seems to be talking about the performance hit that will cause." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
B.Ob. Posted March 21, 2006 Share Posted March 21, 2006 NVIDIA and Havok Bring SLI Physics to Life . Possible Issues, ATI and Final Thoughts "This week at GDC, both Havok and NVIDIA will be showing some technical demos of Havok FX in action, running on NVIDIA GPUs. Though I have not seen the demos yet, NVIDIA gave a brief synopsis of them and told us not to expect anything dramatic quite yet. There probably won’t be any game announcements or any that are far enough into development to show off the physics technology as the Havok FX API has not been finalized yet." SLI And Physics??? "There's no word on when we can actually run SLI physics on our own systems. But NVIDIA says that both games and drivers that support SLI physics will be available by the end of the year." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.