Physics Engine - General Purpose Processing On Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU)

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

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