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Physics for the people!


Slaughter

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Damn no more abnormal physics! No more take reality and throw it out the window! ;):D

They were the most entertaining part of the games like in Mafia when Vincenzo put his head through the table he is resting his hand on while getting a weapon in a drawer of that very same table.

On the other side it was about bloody time! ;)

Now game developers with have a more easy time designing instead of trying to figure out the physics of the game.

I wonder if it can be used in other applications like CAD and modelling programs. That would really rock area of work to it's foundations (I work on the architechts side of the construction business). I would say that modelling and simulations of buildings lifespan could benefit from this cool technology.

One step closer to total immersion into virtual reality. ;)

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In today's issue of "On bloody time!", Nvidia and Havoc is working to add a physics GPU to their graphics cards. With the addition of a AI GPU, they are really getting there!

 

Umm... last time I checked GPU stands for "Graphics Processing Unit"... shurely for a physics chip you mean a "Physics Processing Unit" or PPU.

Same for an AI hardware chip... an AIPU.

 

Edit:

 

After reading the linked article I see what you mean now.

They are talking about getting a standard GPU to do physics calculations, not creating an extra chip to do the work. This is entirly possible as both graphics and physics rely heavily on vector calculations, something for which the GPU is designed to do from the ground up.

 

Edit2:

 

There are also people working on dedicated physics processing units. Gamespot news item here: https://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/08/news_6119895.html

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  • 1 month later...

Today is a day to remember....

It is the day when yours truely, Grazy Gringo got his hands on the Physx card and entered a new era of gaming.... :eh:

It is not due out in the webshops until the 9th so I got a little headstart....Even the storekeeper where I got it hadn't tried it yet....So I am bound for unknown territory here....I'll will return with some screenshots and some thought on this new gizmo.... :P

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Thanks for that little tidbit Neo. It is on the list at Ageia.com....City of Villains also supports it....

Now if only the code was backwards compatible so that 'older' games could have it implemented into the code with a kind of patch....I am just thinking out loud here....

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The game needs to use the Ageia physics engine which automaticly detects for the physics card and uses it if avalable otherwise it defaults to software mode.

 

There was an article in PCGamer about Havoc and nVidia's alternative to PhysX. They use the "spare" capacity on the graphics card to do the physics calculations. While this all sounds good in theory, modern games tend to push graphics hardware to it's limit pretty regulary and so there just isn't any spare capacity for the physics to use.

 

Licencing wise, Ageia's physics SDK and hardware tools are said to be a LOT cheaper for developers to licence than Havoc's physics SDK. Havoc are also said to be planning to charge developers extra to use the graphics hardware accelerated physics, whereas Ageia are offering hardware support for free.

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  • 4 weeks later...

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