jmke

Nvidia Corp. said that it could eventually port computing of physics effects created using PhysX middleware to OpenCL application programming interface (API) and capable hardware. This may actually enable acceleration of physics effects processing on graphics chips to work on ATI Radeon hardware.

At present PhysX middle-ware is used to make physics effects on various platforms, including video game consoles and personal computers. In virtually all the cases processing of physics effects is performed on the central processing units – x86 chips in case of PC, Cell in case of PlayStation 3 or PowerPC in case of Xbox 360 – however, there are handful of games that can take advantage of physics computing on Nvidia GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs) that support CUDA technology. The latter is virtually Nvidia’s proprietary API and is naturally not supported by chips developed by ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices. Due to such limitations not a lot of game developers are implementing GPU PhysX and enabling acceleration using DirectCompute or OpenCL is one of the best ways to popularize processing of physics effects on graphics processors.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/multime..._ OpenCL.html

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