GPU-accelerated Physics Archive

AMD – “Game Developers Only use PhysX for the cash” AMD’s GPU-accelerated Physics Alternative Coming Soon

AMD – “Game Developers Only use PhysX for the cash” AMD’s GPU-accelerated Physics Alternative Coming Soon

THINQ had a very interesting talk with AMD’s senior manager of developer relations, Richard Huddy. Richard says that developers are implementing PhysX into their games simply for the cash, Richard explains,“They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it”. Richard also states that he is very confident about “AMD’s open approach to GPU-accelerated physics as an alternative, and thinks that it will eventually force PhysX to join GLide and A3D in the proprietary API museum”.

This is very interesting news and good for games and physics development. Here at GamePhys we don’t really care which video game physics engine eventually becomes standard in video games and video game development. Physics is no doubt the next big thing in gaming and will really change the way we play games, whether it is PhysX, Havok, or AMD’s upcoming solution we are just exciting that this battle is really heating up and hope to see more cool video game physics developments in the near future.

From THINQ:

Speaking to THINQ, AMD’s senior manager of developer relations, Richard Huddy, said: “What I’ve seen with physics, or PhysX rather, is that Nvidia create a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.”

“They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn’t because the game developer wants it in there.”

In fact, Huddy reckons that no developers outside Epic genuinely wanted to implement GPU-accelerated PhysX in their game. “I’m not aware of any GPU-accelerated PhysX code which is there because the games developer wanted it with the exception of the Unreal stuff,” he says. “I don’t know of any games company that’s actually said ‘you know what, I really want GPU-accelerated PhysX, I’d like to tie myself to Nvidia and that sounds like a great plan.’”

Read the rest of the article here at THINQ.


New Bullet Physics 2.76 SDK Now Available, GPU Acceleration Coming Soon?

New Bullet Physics 2.76 SDK Now Available, GPU Acceleration Coming Soon?

A new release of the Bullet Physics SDK has been released offering several new features and bug fixes. Interesting to note is that it says “The cross-platform cmake build system support is improved and preparations are made towards upcoming OpenCL GPU acceleration for Bullet 3.x” So it sounds like we will definitely be seeing a GPU accelerated version of Bullet Physics sometime in the near future so PhysX will no longer be the only video game Physics engine with GPU acceleration support.

Bullet is a Collision Detection and Rigid Body Dynamics Library. The Library is Open Source and free for commercial use, under the ZLib license. This means you can use it in commercial games, even on next-generation consoles like Sony Playstation 3.

From the Bullet Physics Game Physics Simulation Blog:

The new Bullet 2.76 SDK includes several new features and improvements. The new btInternalEdgeUtility avoid collisions against internal edges for smooth sliding along a triangle mesh. The cross-platform cmake build system support is improved and preparations are made towards upcoming OpenCL GPU acceleration for Bullet 3.x.

The new binary file format improves current and future tools support for Bullet.

The extensible .bullet file serialization is cross-compatible between 32/64bit, little and big endian, single and double precision and different Bullet SDK versions. This means you can export a .bullet file in Maya 64bit on a little endian Intel machine and import it on a 32bit big endian PlayStation 3

You can read the post here and more info about the new release in the Bullet Physics Forum here.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Technical Background Q&A Talks about Physics

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Technical Background Q&A Talks about Physics

PC Games hardware as done a really nice and in-depth Q&A interview with the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 PC version producer, Anders Gyllenberg. In the interview pretty much every technical aspect of the PC version of BFBC2 was talked about, from the use of DX11, ATI Eyefinity support, AA support, Multicore CPU support, and most interesting to us the physics used in the game. As we know BFBC2 uses the Havok Physics engine to produce some impressive physics and destructible environments in the game but PCGH asks why they chose a middleware physics solution such as Havok and asks what his opinion is on GPU-Accelerated physics. Read the rest of the interview here.

If you are interested in the impressive physics in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 be sure to check out The Physics and Destruction of Battlefield Bad Company 2 and also Entire Buildings Collapse in Battlefield Bad Company 2 With Destruction 2.0 for some impressive videos from the PC Beta of the game.

From the PCGH Battlefield: Bad Company 2 technical background Q&A:

PCGH: Frostbite Engine uses Havok physic engine. Why do you decide to work with a middleware solution? Does Frostbite support an advanced destruction system [yeah, we know it do so ;-) “Destruction 2.0”] like terra forming or other physic that influences gameplay? What is your personal opinion about GPU-accelerated PhysX or physics in general?

Anders Gyllenberg: Havok is a good base for us and we have built many layers of our own on top of it to support destruction and our large-scale multiplayer worlds. One interesting feature and quite unique feature is the destructible terrain – it actually affects gameplay and allows the player to take cover in the craters created. We are currently performing all our physics computations on the CPU cores in parallel. CPU/GPU hybrid solutions are an interesting future prospect.

Read the rest of the interview here.


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