l remember hearing and being able to buy physics cards, l don't know what happened too them nor do l knew what they we're used for, all l know is 3d and directx 11 killed it. What was it used for and why was it made/failed?
Physics
I think the technology you are referring to is PhysX. It does exist and is used in NVidia cards. Support in general however (i.e. for graphics cards by ATI, owned by AMD) was slated to be included in DirectX 11 which is due to be released before the end of this year.
As to whether this has been done successfully, I can't say though. This was designed so that a lot of the physics calculations in modern games could be done on the GPU instead of the CPU.
GPUs are designed to do (relatively) simple calculations in parallel (As opposed to CPUs which are predominantly serial) which is the case for most graphics rendering. Turns out that this is the case for physics calculations in the current engines too so it makes sense to be able to utilise the right hardware for the job.
Last edited by AftershockVibe on Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:34 am; edited 1 time in total
As to whether this has been done successfully, I can't say though. This was designed so that a lot of the physics calculations in modern games could be done on the GPU instead of the CPU.
GPUs are designed to do (relatively) simple calculations in parallel (As opposed to CPUs which are predominantly serial) which is the case for most graphics rendering. Turns out that this is the case for physics calculations in the current engines too so it makes sense to be able to utilise the right hardware for the job.
Last edited by AftershockVibe on Thu Jul 30, 2009 3:34 am; edited 1 time in total
The whole idea, is to take more load off of the CPU and put it on a chip that can handle it better. Right now that is on all 8xxx Geforce Cards and higher for Nvidia. So far there are only a few games that most people don't play that have taken advantage of Phyisics.
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