A new life for physics engines?

February 5th, 2008 by Marc Olano

You can’t buy any PC these days without some graphics acceleration, and you certainly can’t play games without a decent GPU. Yet add-on physics accelerators have yet to catch on. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Why would a user spend the money on a physics card if games don’t use it? Then again, why would a game company target a physics card if no users have them? The few games that have made use of physics accelerators have just used them for “eye candy” — fancier explosions or slightly more real incidental animation with absolutely no impact on the gameplay at all. After all, if they required a physics card (as they do for specific GPUs), then many fewer people might by the game.

Well, some recent developments might change that. Several recent news stories report that NVIDIA is buying physics-accelerator company Ageia. Hard to say where they’re going from here, but certainly a combo GPU/physics processor might finally break the deadlock and get enough physics accelerators out there to make them viable.

Posted in Hardware, industry news |

Related posts:

• Eurographics announces Game Physics Innovation Competition
• IBM using Second Life to build online communities
• CSI in Second Life

TrackBack URI

Leave a Reply