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

Nice! But...

[johannesg]

...what will be calculating my 3D images, if the GPU is already working on the physics? It is not like there is so much spare capacity left over in modern games anyway...

Re:It's the "Ray" experience.

[Andy Dodd]

Have they? Where's the big news announcement?

The last big news I saw was not that they OSed the drivers, but that they had given partial card specs and promised more.

Please note that Matrox did the same thing in 1999 - They gave partial card specs (insufficient for implementing any 3D) and promised more, but never delivered. Lots of Linux users got suckered into buying paperweight G200s (including myself) back then. I will buy a card that performs as advertised NOW (whether or not it is with an open source driver or not), not a card that the manufacturer promises will eventually perform as advertised but can't at the moment.

Re:It's the "Ray" experience.

[Andy Dodd]

"ATI needs the market share too badly."
So did Matrox...