physx

PC Mirror’s Edge Uses PhysX To Awesome Effect

10:20AM Stuart Houghton | The reason for DICE delaying the PC release of Mirror’s Edge may be a little clearer. DICE are retooling the PC version with enhanced graphics and – video card permitting – the NVIDIA PhysX engine to allow more accurate physics modelling of the virtual cityscape and the many, many things that can realistically fall off it. As you can see in the trailer (after the jump) it does look rather lovely. Suitably equipped PC owners will be able to realistically fall off things in January.

NVIDIA Unleashes PhysX For GeForce 8 and Up

1:20AM Mike Fahey | Graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA bought PhysX cards creators AGEIA back in February, promising a free upgrade to existing GeForce 8 and above cards using their CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) interface down the line. Well we are now sufficiently down the line, as NVIDIA has released the first of many planned GeForce Power Packs (grab it here), which not only enables the technology but also gives you some nifty tools to explore it with. Included in the first Power Pack is a complete version of Warmonger, one of the original showcases for the PhysX technology, an Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod Pack with three maps, sneak peeks at Unreal Engine 3 powered social networking service Nurien, a couple of tech demos, and the drivers to make the whole thing go. Hit the jump for more info on this rather impressive update.

PhysX Coming To A GeForce 8 Near You

10:30AM Logan Booker | Wondering what NVIDIA’s plans are for the PhysX tech it acquired recently? The Tech Report has confirmation from NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang that the company plans to incorporate support for that hardware-accelerated physics middleware into its GeForce 8 range of GPUs. But it won’t be doing it in hardware. It doesn’t need to. The massively parallel nature of the GPU is already designed to handle the type of processing required for hardware physics. All it takes is a bit of software magic, and PhysX will run happily on GPUs that support CUDA. What’s CUDA? It stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and put simply, it’s a tech included in the GeForce 8 range that allows the GPU to run general purpose code. According to the TR article, NVIDIA will port the PhysX middleware to a variant of the C programming language that can run on GPUs. Then it’s just a matter of executing the code on the video card and voila – hardware PhysX support without the need for a PhysX card. If anything’s going to help the adoption of the PhysX middleware, it’s knowing you only need one piece of hardware to take advantage of it. Note that PhysX is free, while Havok is not, so the latter will undoubtedly be keeping a close eye on this development. Huang didn’t put a date on support, but I suspect it’ll come in the form of a driver update in the not-too-distant future. GeForce 8 graphics processors to gain PhysX support [Tech Report, via Blue's News] More »

NVIDIA Talks More On AGEIA Purchase

10:30AM Logan Booker | FiringSquad got in touch with NVIDIA recently to chat about its acquisition of PhysX designer AGEIA. I found it a curious decision, considering NVIDIA’s GPUs support Havok’s hardware-accelerated physics implementation, not to mention PhysX hasn’t exactly taken the world by storm. Now it looks like NVIDIA’s plans for AGEIA’s technology aren’t just games-related. You can head on over to FiringSquad for the entire interview, however, here’s the meatiest part of the short talk: Second, the computer industry is moving towards a heterogeneous computing model, combining a flexible CPU and a massively parallel processor like the GPU to perform computationally intensive applications like real-time computer graphics. Physics is a natural for processing on the GPU because, like graphics, it is made up of thousands of parallel computations, and with our CUDA technology, which is rapidly becoming one of the most pervasive parallel computing programming environments in history, we can open this exciting parallel processing world to applications desperate for a giant step in computing performance—such as physics processing, computer vision, video/image processing, and a world of exciting applications we’ve not yet imagined. What I’m getting from this is that NVIDIA isn’t so much interested in AGEIA for hardware-accelerated physics in games, but more what the massively parallel design of the hardware can be used for in certain general processing tasks. This is something AGEIA’s PPU and the GPU have in common. Is NVIDIA looking to take on Intel and AMD? There’s definitely a place for this sort of hardware in specialised markets. NVIDIA AGEIA PhysX Acquisition Interview [FiringSquad] More »