NVIDIA and Electronic Arts (EA) just announced that EA and 2K Games would use PhysX. While Mirror’s Edge is getting most of the buzz right now, this announcement basically means that all the development studios from EA have access to the GPU-accelerated PhysX engine, which runs with one or multiple GPUs.
For those not familiar with PhysX, it is a physics engine from NVIDIA that is GPU-accelerated. There’s also a CPU path, for those who don’t have a compatible GPU (GeForce Series 8 and beyond). Often, adding a great many physically animated things such as debris or particles becomes too expensive when handled only by the CPU, which is already working on running the game. On a multi-GPU computer, users can dedicate one GPU to compute physics. Obviously CPU-makers argue that using multiple-cores would offset this issue, without requiring one or more GPUs. Intel has bought Havok, a top physics engine company that pioneered GPU-accelerated physics (with a lot of help from NVIDIA).
Filed in ..