| PhysX |
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| June 2011 | |
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PhysX is a proprietary Software Development Kit (SDK) owned and developed by Nvidia Corporation. It is used in gaming hardware to speed up graphical performance in areas related to physics. We have extracted a few pieces of key info from the official Nividia website for ease of reference here. However, please go to http://www.nvidia.com/object/physx_faq.html for full details. NVIDIA® PhysX® is a powerful physics engine (software) that is adopted by over 150 games and is used by more than 10,000 software application developers as in June 2011. PhysX is optimized for hardware acceleration by massively parallel processors. A GeForce GPU with PhysX provides an exponential increase in physics processing power over the one not supporting PhysX. PhysX SDK is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Wii. Without physics in games, objects just don't seem to act the way you'd want or expect them to in real life. With PhysX, game worlds literally come to life: walls can be torn down, glass can be shattered, trees bend in the wind, and water flows with body and force. The minimum requirement to support GPU-accelerated PhysX is a GeForce 8-series or later GPU with a minimum of 32 CUDA cores and 256MB dedicated graphics memory. However, each PhysX application has its own GPU and memory recommendations. The multithreaded PhysX engine was designed specifically for hardware acceleration in massively parallel environments. GPU rather than CPU is the natural place to compute physics calculations because physics processing is driven by thousands of parallel computations. Return to Advanced Features page |