Nvidia Physics Card?
Posted: Wed Sep 27, 2006 6:07 am
I think that article is a misunderstanding. nVidia's approach (as is mine - see the 'GPU Physics' thread, http://continuousphysics.com/Bullet/php ... .php?t=500) is to use the features of an absolutly standard graphics card for doing physics computations. They may have provided a slot on their motherboard for an additional GRAPHICS card - whose function is reserved for doing physics - but there is (as far as I know) no push within nVidia to make dedicated physics hardware.Erin Catto wrote:http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=4329
It is more about going parallel and how to deal with memory caching, rather then 'optimizing' the processor for physics.So I'm pretty sure that dedicated physics-only hardware is a LONG way off - but I don't care because physics-on-a-GPU is very do-able
Well, there are some features that would make physics massively easier on the GPU. One of those would be the ability to write to multiple output textures instead of just one. That feature is definitely being discussed by the OpenGL ARB and will probably appear next year or so.Erwin Coumans wrote: It is more about going parallel and how to deal with memory caching, rather then 'optimizing' the processor for physics.
That's true - but they are getting better. Each new generation of GPU makes the shader processors a little more like conventional CPU's (for example, non-inlined function calls were added in the more recent processors).GPU's are massively parallel and deal with efficient memory access, but they are not flexible enough for the most 'complicated' physics algorithms,
...which is fine for game consoles - but not so great for regular PC's because the adoption of CELL in the PC suffers from the exact same chicken-and-egg problem as the PhysX engine.so the CELL SPU/multicore is still a benefit for accurate physics/collision detection. 'complicated' refers to both code complexity and branching, as well as difficult to predict random-memory access.
Yes! Figuring out how to do some of these things in the GPU is definitely stretching my brain in directions it's never been in before. Writing shaders is the most fun thing I've done in many years.Still, its very interesting to taming those new parallel processors!