[PREVIEW] Multi-Core CPU Support in PhysX Coming To PhysX FluidMark

Geeks3D is reporting that they are working on a new version of their PhysX FluidMark benchmark that will support Multi-Core CPU Support for running the PhysX calculations. In recent news AMD called out NVIDIA claiming that they have purposely disabled multi-core CPU support for PhysX. NVIDIA then released a statement claiming that this was simply not true stating “Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves“. So this new update to PhysX FluidMark should answer this question once and for all and allow people to do some really interesting tests and benchmarks with PhysX running on the GPU or dedicated PhysX card and then benchmark with the CPU handling all the PhysX calculations.

From Geeks3D:

I’m currently updating Geeks3D’s PhysX FluidMark tool and from my last tests, multi-core CPU support in PhysX seems to be ok (that confirms what NVIDIA said in this news)… At least on my dev station with an ATI Radeon HD 5770 and an AMD X2 3800+.

Read the rest of the article here.

In case you are not familiar with PhysX FluidMark it is a free to download PhysX benchmarking and stability tool perfect for quickly testing out a new PhysX setup to make sure PhysX was installed and up and running correctly, you can download it here and a YouTube video showing it in action was embedded below.

From the PhysX FluidMark page:

PhysX FluidMark is a physics benchmark based on NVIDIA PhysX engine. This benchmark performs a fluid simulation by imitating the renderering of lava. Real physics parameters such as viscosity are used. SPH (Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) algorithm is enabled to increase the realism of the simulation.

This benchmark exploits OpenGL for graphics acceleration and requires an OpenGL 2.0 compliant graphics card: NVIDIA GeForce 5/6/7/8/9/GTX200 (and higher), AMD/ATI Radeon 9600+, 1k/2k/3k/4k (and higher) or a S3 Graphics Chrome 400 series.