General Purpose Processing On Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU)
Hardware acceleration for physics processing is now usually provided by graphics processing units that support more general computation, a concept known as General Purpose processing on Graphics Processing Unit. AMD and NVIDIA provide support for rigid body dynamics computations on their latest graphics cards.
NVIDIA's GeForce 8 Series supports a GPU-based Newtonian physics acceleration technology named Quantum Effects Technology. NVIDIA provides an SDK Toolkit for what they call CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology that offers both a low and high-level API to the GPU. For their GPUs, AMD offers a similar SDK, called Close to Metal (CTM), which provides a thin hardware interface.
PhysX is an example of a physics engine that can use GPGPU based hardware acceleration when it is available.
Read more about this topic: Physics Engine
Famous quotes containing the words general, purpose and/or unit:
“There was not a tree as far as we could see, and that was many miles each way, the general level of the upland being about the same everywhere. Even from the Atlantic side we overlooked the Bay, and saw to Manomet Point in Plymouth, and better from that side because it was the highest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“...Often the accurate answer to a usage question begins, “It depends.” And what it depends on most often is where you are, who you are, who your listeners or readers are, and what your purpose in speaking or writing is.”
—Kenneth G. Wilson (b. 1923)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)