Counter-Strike:Source

Nvidia will this week is showing in-game physics code calculations being run on a graphics processor, the first time this has been done in public, the company claimed today. We have two small movies available which will show this in action.


The process uses code from physics and character animation middleware maker Havok. Its Havok FX software provides an API for the mathematics games need to perform to work out how objects physically interact with each other - the effect of gravity, friction, mass, elasticity and so on. Havok FX runs these calculations on the host computer's GPU rather the main processor. Havok's approach frees up the CPU to focus on ever more complex artificial intelligence calculations.

AGEIA believes that games can be at far better quality once you will not only calculate pixels but also common real-world physics by a special processor. So in a way you could look at the PPU as an adon for a GPU. The new product that they will be releasing has no less than 125 million transistors on-board, which is the average transistor count of your current DX9 mid-range graphics card.

The only way to get real physics with the scale, sophistication, fidelity and level of interactivity that dramatically alters your entertainment experience is with the AGEIA PhysX processor, which was developed from day one to accelerate the highly specialized physically based simulations. And the only way for serious gamers to get true mind-blowing physics in gaming is with a PhysX Accelerator add-in card available today from leading game system vendors such as Dell, Alienware and Falcon Northwest.

Newell: There are a couple of different issues going on there. With our physics, the player can collide with objects. This is a good thing. The stuff that is being shown by NVidia right now, the latencies are too high. Their physics is essentially to make prettier pictures. It’s like you can have a bunch of different things bouncing around so long as they don’t actually touch anything that matters. If you don’t actually have to read the data out – if your AI system ever needed to know about whether or not one of those objects had collided with something else it would run slower by running on the GPU than having it run on the main CPU. So physics that matter is different than physics that makes pretty pictures.

The presentation quality is fine. I think we went through a round of that with graphics acceleration. It wasn’t until it enabled different types of games, games that involve the game logic being able to ascertain the state of the physics system I think that that’s the really important long term direction from everybody. So having pretty explosions is cool, but you stop seeing it pretty quickly. You only see the stuff that actually matters. There’s still a lot of work to be able to figure out how to get an order of magnitude or two orders of magnitude improvement in that kind of physics. That’ll be a big challenge for everybody.