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.

While Nvidia fans and consumers are waiting for live demonstration of long-awaited GF100 (Fermi) GPU on CES 2010, we are focused on new PhysX demos and games that Nvidia, without doubt, has brought to CES.

Thanks to PC Watch website, sneak peak on GF100 demo system is already available (video by TweakTown)

More interesting, Nvidia will demonstrate special “Supersonic Sled” PhysX demo on this system, according to PC Games Hardware

Nvidia confirmed to PC Games Hardware that there will be a special Physx demo, called Supersonic Sled, on display at the CES. The rocket that is shown, isn’t just animated physically correct, but also offers the appropriate smoke – the destructible obstacles are animated correctly, too. The demo supports DirectX 11 and 3D Vision.

Update: Supersonic Sled demo was shown running on Thermaltake Element system, with three GF100 GPUs inside. Only one demo screenshot is present, blurry because of stereo effect (click to view full pic)

Source: computerbase.de

Read the rest of this entry »

EXPreview.com website has published detailed pics of EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX – card with exceptional design, which combines two different GPU,  G200 (GTX 275) and G92 (GTS 250), on one PCB.

55nm GT200b graphics-rendering chip (left one on a pic below) operates at a 633MHz core, 1296MHz shaders and has 896MB of GDDR3 memory, running at 2268MHz. 55nm G92b chip (right one), fully dedicated to PhysX processing,  runs at a 738MHz core, 1836MHz shaders, and has 384MB of 2200MHz GDDR3 memory.

Cooling system consist of two heatsinks with heatpipes, fan in the middle.

Source: EXPreview.com

Short video, covering PhysX Technology overview from Jen-Hsun Huang GTC 09 keynote, is available now on Nvidia YouTube channel (in 720p and 1080p versions).

Clip demonstrates realtime demos of SPH Fluid and multigrid Eulerian Smoke simulations.

Related materials:  GTC PhysX demos screenshots pack and GTC APEX Wall Destruction demo

Under “Would you like to Ask Nvidia A question?” iniative Nvidia employees have answered another portion of questions, this time solely related to PhysX:

#1 – How do you expect PhysX to compete in a DirectX 11/OpenCL world?

By Tom Petersen, Director of Technical Marketing: PhysX does not compete with OpenCL or DX11’s DirectCompute.

PhysX is an API and runtime that allows games and game engines to model the physics in a game. Think of PhysX as a layer above OpenCL or DirectCompute, which in contrast are very generic and low level interfaces that enable GPU-accelerated computation. Game developers don’t create content in OpenCL or DirectCompute. Instead they author in toolsets (some of which are provided by NVIDIA) that allow them to be creative quickly. Once they have good content they “compile” a specific platform (PC, Wii, Xbox, PS3, etc) using another tool flow.

During this process game studios have three basic concerns:

1. Does PhysX make it easier to develop games for all platforms – including consoles?

2. Does PhysX make it easier to have kick ass effects in my game?

3. Will NVIDIA support my efforts to integrate this technology?

And the answer to the three questions above is: yes, yes, and yes. We are spending our time and money pursuing those goals to support developers, and right now the developer community is not telling us that OpenCL or DirectCompute support are required.

At the end of the day, the success of PhysX as a technology will depend on how easy it is for game designers to use and how incredible the game effects are that they create. Batman: Arkham Asylum is a good example of the type of effects we can achieve with PhysX running on NVIDIA GPUs, and we are working to make the next round of games even more compelling. At this time, NVIDIA has no plan to move from CUDA to either OpenCL or DirectCompute as the implementation engine for GPU acceleration. Instead we are working to support developers and implement killer effects.

#2 – Will PhysX become open-source?

Tom Petersen: NVIDIA is investing a lot of time and effort in PhysX and we do not plan to make it open source today. Of course the binaries for the SDK are distributed for free, and source code is available for licensing if game designers need it.

Only partial version is displayed. You can view full answer here

Browsing through the web recently, I’ve found that The Unofficial PhysX Links & Info Page, oldest info website about PhysX technology (since 2005), was finally closed after several months of inactivity. Title page says:

This page will not be updated anymore.

For all things PhysX, go to physxinfo.com.

Back in early 2007 this website inspired me to start my own PhysX project, that evolved afterwards to PhysXInfo.com

Farewell !