Game Physics via Graphics Card

Graphics chip developer Nvidia and physics specialist Havok have announced they will be showing off some new software technology at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) next week in San Jose, California. Running physics calculations through a graphics GPU is not a new idea, it’s been mooted for Xbox 360 – it’s perfectly possible for part of the console’s ATI GPU being fenced-off and used for physics rather than graphical calculations.

Now the concept is being put into practice by Nvidia and Havok. At the GDC the companies will unveil something called Havok FX, which will enable games to run physics calculations through graphics cards supporting Shader Model 3.0 such as the GeForce 6 and 7 cards.

With Havok FX, a gaming system can simulate thousands of colliding rigid bodies, said Nvidia, calculating friction, collisions, gravity, mass and velocity. This lets game developers program their titles to handle complex debris, smoke and fluid effects without bogging down the computer’s CPU. In October of last year, ATI discussed the opportunity to use the massive floating point computation power of a graphics processor to enable accelerated physics - but Nvidia is first to introduce the feature to the market: Called "SLI Physics," the feature will offloads physics calculations from the CPU to the graphics processor and promises to bring movie-type effects from crashing cars and speeding bullets to the PC screen - all with smooth frame rates. A new software driver for Nvidia's graphics cards will use the second graphics processor to enable the feature in future games.

Nvidia says the technology is particularly well suited for computers that are equipped with more than one graphics card connected using Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface (SLI) technology, which enables multiple Nvidia graphics processors to share the burden of rendering 3D graphics.

To know more about this, see Nvidia's Press release.