PhysX

PhysX referred to a proprietary physics engine of the company Nvidia. PhysX shifted the calculation of physical effects in computer games and simulation software on graphics cards Nvidia GeForce series of the manufacturer. Thus, the main processor of the cost of these calculations is relieved, with the aim to accelerate the flow and display speed ( frame rate ) and / or to increase the quality of the display with additional effects.

History

At the beginning of the development of the PhysX physics engine Novodex was developed by the eponymous Swiss companies. The Novodex AG, a spin-off of ETH Zurich, was acquired by the semiconductor manufacturer Ageia 2004. This developed a special physics engine and marketed their hardware along with the software under the name PhysX.

In February 2008, took over the graphics chip maker Nvidia Ageia and the PhysX engine integrated in the in-house CUDA system to make it run on the GeForce series. Thus, the physics calculations can also be performed by the graphics card, which makes additional physics accelerator optional. However, the graphics card must support CUDA and installed a current graphics card driver. This is the case since the Nvidia graphics card driver version 177.83 of the case. It is also possible to use a discrete graphics card only as a physics accelerator.

Areas of application

Compute-intensive operations, such as the physics of rigid bodies, the simulation of liquids such as water or lava, as well as the realistic behavior of ropes, hair or clothing provide the main application of the PhysX engine dar. This means that the following effects are possible:

  • Explosions with smoke and debris
  • Complex characters with realistic movements and interactions
  • By wind moving things, such as leaves, paper, sparks, water, etc.
  • Dense, moving objects enveloping fog

In addition to PCs PhysX also found in the game consoles Wii ( Nintendo ), PlayStation 3 ( Sony ) and Xbox 360 ( Microsoft ) application.

Criticism

The website Realworldtech analyzed the PhysX code and denounces that this only use one core for processing in conjunction with the main processors. But if the graphics chip set as " PhysX Processor ", then repack the GeForce driver tasks automatically in multiple threads, and the frame rate is fast in the air. In addition, Nvidia use only report obsolete commands for x87 floating-point calculations, of which Intel and AMD advise against since the beginning of 2000. Efficient SSE instructions that could be integrated without much programming effort and performance would improve significantly on current CPUs, Nvidia do not use for PhysX.

This Realworldtech deduced suspect Nvidia brake calculating PhysX effects on CPUs from artificially to make the GeForce graphics cards bestow another selling point.

Nvidia Senior PR Manager Bryan Del Rizzo had one hand the allegations of deliberate Ausbremsung of CPUs, but promised the other hand, in the PhysX version 3.0 automatic multithreading and SSE support.

AMD's senior manager of developer relations, Richard Huddy, spoke in this context would prefer that PhysX hopefully soon along with Glide and A3D lands in the proprietary API Museum and is replaced by open implementations such as OpenCL and Direct Compute.

Application programs with PhysX support

  • 3DMark06
  • Dark Physics
  • 3DMark Vantage
  • 3D Game Studio (from A8 integrated)
  • Unreal Engine
  • Unity
34121
de