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Modders Get Nvidia's PhysX To Run On ATI Cards
stress_life writes "Following controversial allegations that Nvidia is cheating in 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3 benchmarks, executives from Futuremark and Epic moved forward to clean any confusion.
However, the game was not over — enthusiasts from Israel ported PhysX middleware to run on ATI Radeon cards, achieving remarkable performance. Owners of ATI Radeon cards will be able to play PhysX games as well, such as Ghost Recon 2 and already mentioned Unreal Tournament 3."
Might also find this interesting-- AMD/ATI sure has been having a lot of fun lately.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Larrabee-Ray-Tracing,5769.html
This latest round of cards from Nvidia and ATI seems to have been won by ATI as well. For $300 you can get the AMD 4870, on the performance of the $400 Nvidia 260, and sometimes as good (depending on the game) as the $600 280.
Sure I grock the term "PPU" and can maybe even imagine it's got some fast elastic particle simmulations.
But what "physics" is really there. What's the interface look like.
Is it real physics? Would it be good for say simmulating chemical dynamics with quantum or classical force fields? COuld I use it to model the hydrodynamics of a sail boat cutting through the water?
What about applied math or engineering physics like say the propagation and attenuation of sound in a turbulent atmoshere or concert hall.
What about a piece of rope falling, a flag in the wind, or a ball and spring model?
Just what does this do and how does the interface look?
if possible compare it to CUDA since I know what that does.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My guess is that nVidia will put a stop to this pretty quickly. PhysX is covered by at least a couple of patents. There may be others pending or that were assigned to nVidia.
I don't know if PhysX is covered by patent protection in Israel, but it's possible. In any event, don't count on official PhysX support from ATI any time soon.
Well, the amazing part of the whole deal here is that benchmarks show almost no decrease in framerate with PhysX turned on. So yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
I suspect they'll license it to ATi.
The nVidia people are probably well aware that hogging PhysX to themselves is a stupid idea. Game makers aren't going to go out of their way to support it unless it can be reasonably expected that most gamers will be able to use it. It's a dead fish unless ATi can use it. That doesn't mean they'll just hand it over.
Is it real physics? Would it be good for say simmulating chemical dynamics with quantum or classical force fields? COuld I use it to model the hydrodynamics of a sail boat cutting through the water?
No. Most physics middleware provide a simplified model (collision detection, rigid body physics, etc...) which is great for visual gimmicks in games, but is too much an approximation to be used in research. You would need other engines which are optimized to do accurate physics modelling - Gromacs comes as an example.
Now about the hardware behind this : Ageia's PPU could in theory be used to accelerate research calculation. The problem is the lack of a proper API. This processor has only PhysX as available API which is specialized for gaming oriented physics. The SieveC compiler is supposed to be able to generate parallel programs for the PPU but hasn't been released publicly.
Whereas, even if the GPU port of PhysX is only oriented for gaming-specific applications, ATI Radeon card also expose the much more general purpose API "Brook+" (the usage of which is already demonstrated in Folding@Home) and nVidia card have CUDA that you know.
Unlike PhysX, those API expose generic numerical methods and can be used to calculate applications as diverse as you mention. Including calculating the game-specific Ageia PhysX.
PhysX is to CUDA what, for example, Gromacs could be compared to Fortan. The first is a specific engine which is optimised to solve some very specific problems, the second is a general purpose language that can be used to crunch numbers.
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Maybe the amount of physics that would overwhelm the CPU (which can also kill framerate, BTW) is hardly lifting a finger for the GPU. It's certainly not impossible; GPUs do blow away CPUs for some calculations, which is why we have GPUs in the first place.