There certainly is no shortage of news coming out of Computex this year. More so than at any other event, major manufacturers take the opportunity to release new technology and products amongst the congregated masses of enthusiasts. NVIDIA has finally let the cat out of the bag in regards to what their plans are for GPU physics.

NVIDIA’s physics software will be free for anyone to use (as was AGEIA’s PhysX API), and will run on any GeForce 8 series card or later. What this means is that AMD and Intel will both have the opportunity to use the physics software and implement support for it into their hardware. The problem here is that the Physics API is probably based off of NVIDIA’s CUDA, while Intel and AMD could have conflicting languages or whatever (hey, we are not computer science people!) that would make integration difficult.

NVIDIA’s GPU Physics was seen in full effect running on the brand new GTX 280 at Computex as part of a new Football game demo. The main advantage that NVIDIA has over AGEIA in terms of distributing their software is The Way it’s Meant to be Played initiative. NVIDIA has industry-wide acceptance and has already implanted itself into countless major titles. The company will probably have little trouble doing the same thing with physics.

So, after a two year incubation period, that GPU physics thing we heard about has finally come to fruition. Time will tell if it is as good as NVIDIA says it is.

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