KitGuru website has brought us news that Manju Hedge, former CUDA and PhysX Solutions Vice President (previously – CEO and co-founder of Ageia) has left NVIDIA to join AMD.

Our own sources at NVIDIA are indicating  – this information is truthful.

However, according to our data, Manju departure won’t affect PhysX (he hasn’t been working on PhysX for over a year) or CUDA development process in NVIDIA, and his new roll in AMD won’t be connected to game physics related projects (instead, Manju is going to be involved in ISV recruitment).

Update: Pursuant to latest press-release, Manju Hedge will lead AMD Fusion Experience Program.

Update #2: from X-bit Labs article

In particular, [Manju Hedge] will manage the developer relations teams that help independent software developers (ISVs) to implement program code optimized for heterogeneous multi-core microprocessors.

We want to thanks Manju Hedge for awesome work on PhysX front and wish him best of luck with this new assignment !

Interesting research project, called pCubee – five-paneled LCD cube that gives users the appearance that virtual objects are inside and product of two years of work by students at the University of British Columbia – has drawn our attention recently. Why ? Because software part of pCubee is based on Open Scene Graph and PhysX SDK.

As you may see, pCubee can handle not only simple rigid bodies collisions, but also more complicated objects, like softbodies (1:20 – 1:27) and particle systems.

Gonna be interesting to see if this project will evolve from concept to something more consistent, like game console or other consumer entertainment product.

Supersonic Rocket Sled – DX11 and PhysX technology demo from Nvidia is finally available for download (221 mb). Unfortunately, you won’t be able to run it until you have GTX 400 Series GPU.

You can download Supersonic Sled demo from here

Apart from Supersonic Rocket Sled demo all of you are probably familar already, for GF100 launch Nvidia has prepared another technical PhysX demo, called Raging Rapids Ride, with boat riding down a montain river – maybe not so impressive in graphics aspect, but with intensive and complex real-time fluid simulation.

It using PhysX SDK based objects with custom hybrid water simulation, utilizing both heightfield fluid solver and particle simulation.  Boat behaviour is a little choppy, escpecially when it collides with waterside surface, but water simulation looks very impressive.

Update: You can download Raging Rapids Ride demo here

Grid based shallow water flowing pass a terrain with high slope is automatically turned into particle waterfall, and than – back to heightfield water (thus, two different fluid solvers are used simultaneously).

Read the rest of this entry »

In recent interview to Xbit Labs, Ashutosh Rege, the worldwide director of developer technology at Nvidia, denies accusations of bribing game developers for implementation of GPU PhysX, stated by AMD.

Such claims were given by Richard Huddy, AMD’s senior manager of developer relations, in his interview to THINQ.co.uk website:

“What I’ve seen with physics, or PhysX rather, is that Nvidia create a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.”

Following responce from Nvidia Ashutosh Rege

“There could be no deal under which we would cash somebody in for using PhysX“

“What we do when we add GPU PhysX engagement with the developer is that in no shape or form we do anything harmful for the rest of the platforms, those that do not support GPU PhysX. It is just an additive value to our GeForce customers and eventually it boosts game experience on the PC”

Source: Xbitlabs.com

Update: additional commentaries from Nadeem Mohammed, Director of PhysX Product Management:

Once PhysX is selected and the developer plans to have a PC version, we will work closely with them to provide whatever engineering and technical assistance to make the PC version as good as it can be – and hopefully that includes pushing the edge on special PhysX effects which may require GPU acceleration for best performance.

We will “invest” our time, energy, expertise and technology to make good games into great PC titles – if that’s what AMD is talking about then sure they are right!

Source: PCGamesHardware.com

Official trailer of Rocket Sled demo (also known as Supersonic Sled), with detailed DX 11 and PhysX features description, emerges on YouTube recently.

Firstly shown on CES 2010, Rocket Sled is supposed to demonstrate both graphics and physics computing capabilities of new GF100 (Fermi) GPUs.

If you are interested in more in-depth technical details behind this demo, you can watch this video or read this article.

As we mentioned before, recent materials from post-CES 2010 special GF100 breifing by Nvidia revealed certain in-depth details on PhysX Technology current status.

Now, thanks to Acrofan, we have now complete video record (20 min) from that briefing, covering part with PhysX SDK and APEX Toolset description, recent improvements on console PhysX versions, engine features and developer tools details, etc.

BTW, at 9:40 they were using graph from our Popular Physics Engines comparison article, and PhysXInfo was called “very cool website”

Impressive video of realtime Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) PhysX Fluid simulation demo, running on GF100 GPU, was uploaded to YouTube by Nvidia recently.

According to certain slides, this demo is using 128 000 particles, running on 141 frames per second.

First game that made use of PhysX SPH, Cryostasis, simulated 30,000 water particles at average 30 frames per second on the GT200 architecture. Next title with extensive SPH Fluids effects is going to be Metro 2033, as we heard.

Earlier this month, AMD critized Nvidia again, this time on crippling PhysX multi-threaded capabilities.

“When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multicore implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. That’s pretty shabby! I wonder why Nvidia has done that?” said Richard Huddy, AMD worldwide developer relations manager, in an interview with Bit-tech.com

“It’s the same thing as Intel’s old compiler tricks that it used to do; Nvidia simply takes out all the multicore optimisations in PhysX. In fact, if coded well, the CPU can tackle most of the physics situations presented to it.”

Tomshardware asked Nvidia for its responce for such allegations, and here is an answer by Nadeem Mohammad, PhysX director of product management:

I have been a member of the PhysX team, first with AEGIA, and then with NVIDIA, and I can honestly say that since the merger with NVIDIA there have been no changes to the SDK code which purposely reduces the software performance of PhysX or its use of CPU multi-cores.

Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves. One of the best examples is 3DMarkVantage which can use 12 threads while running in software-only PhysX. This can easily be tested by anyone with a multi-core CPU system and a PhysX-capable GeForce GPU. This level of multi-core support and programming methodology has not changed since day one. And to anticipate another ridiculous claim, it would be nonsense to say we “tuned” PhysX multi-core support for this case.

PhysX is a cross platform solution. Our SDKs and tools are available for the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, the PC and even the iPhone through one of our partners. We continue to invest substantial resources into improving PhysX support on ALL platforms–not just for those supporting GPU acceleration.

As is par for the course, this is yet another completely unsubstantiated accusation made by an employee of one of our competitors. I am writing here to address it directly and call it for what it is, completely false. NVIDIA PhysX fully supports multi-core CPUs and multithreaded applications, period. Our developer tools allow developers to design their use of PhysX in PC games to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs and to fully use the multithreaded capabilities.

Source: nTersect Blog

Unreal Development Kit (UDK) was released several month ago, but users are still playing with it’s PhysX SDK powered destruction and fracturing functionality. You can find tons of “Fracture Tests” videos on YouTube – from simple destroyable walls to a whole buildings.

Good illustration of fracturing tests apogee is this video from user v8matey, which containsts several destructible buildings and even road, that can be ripped into pieces.

We’ll just need to wait untill all this stuff will be used to enhance actual gameplay.