All GeForce 8 Graphics Cards to Gain PhysX Support

J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed exactly what it plans to do with the company's PhysX physics processing engine. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Nvidia is working to add PhysX support to its GeForce 8 series graphics processors using its CUDA general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) application programming interface. PhysX support will be available to all GeForce 8 owners via a simple software download, allowing those users to accelerate games that use the PhysX API without the need for any extra hardware. (Older cards aren't CUDA-compatible and therefore won't gain PhysX support.) With Havok FX shelved, the move may finally popularize hardware-accelerated physics processing in games."

Comments

now that the gpu is doing 2 things lets do 3 !!!

[sirmonkey]

so now that my vid card is processing the 3d graphics and the physics (which is really only eye candy) how about we make it -the gpu- run the O/S tooo!!!! ooo ooo my next summer project! have linux run on just the video card! (openmosix is still around right :-D?) :-p what?!?!?! it runs on everything else. right now i'm typeing this on my old 700mhz laptop running the latest debian :-p

Re:So, what's actually accelerated here?

[TeknoHog]

Obviously, gravity and other kinds of non-steady motion are good targets for acceleration. And because of NVidia's evil closed source drivers, the best way to accelerate your GeForce is at 9.81 m/s**2.

Re:So, what's actually accelerated here?

[teslar]

Naw, it's much easier than you think. All of Physics can be expressed by just one equation, the Grand Unified Theory, the computation of which is accelerated by PhysX. The Grand Unified Theory was first discovered when programmers at Valve tried to optimise the physics engine of HL2. From the link:

Game Engine Software Engineer at Valve, Jose Garcia discovered the theory. "The game engine ran too slowly. I was assigned the job of speeding it up," he said. "I started out by combining some of the gravity equations with some of the other force equations and found it all started to fit together. After a day, I had fine-tuned the entire physics-animation functions down to four lines of code, which ran a bit faster," he added.

;)

PhysX support GREAT!!

[tristian_was_here]

Its good to see PhysX support, I know it was worth keeping my limbs rather than selling a arm or leg to make Ghost Recon Advance Warfare 2 to work good.

Re:Sarbanes-Oxley

[GregPK]

I think it's very forward thinking of NVidia to have incorporated the ability to do this for nearly a year. I'd say its almost game changing.

Re:Compositing window managers

[fbjon]

Not to mention a GUI isn't useful either, since everything can be done on the command line anyway. In fact, all you need is a bank of LEDs to indicate the state of the registers!