Earlier this year, Matthias Müller-Fischer, PhysX SDK Research Lead in NVIDIA, has presented new universal solver that can be used simulate almost any kind of objects – rigid, plastic, cloth or soft body.

You can familiarize with this work via previously published research papers: Solid Simulation with Oriented Particles and Adding Physics to Animated Characters with Oriented Particles.

Today, interesting video was revealed – it is showcasing impressive 20x performance improvement for this type of simulation running on GPU through CUDA, in comparison to CPU execution (5 “Lionfish” objects on CPU vs 100 on GPU – in real-time).

Sometimes findings of PhysX Research team are incorporated in PhysX/APEX products, and sometimes, for various reasons, they just become a research paper or presentation. We hope that in case with solver there will be only one option – first one.

Hardware website PCPOP.COM has published an overview article about various GPU technologies and features, like 3D Vision, Stream, Eyefinity, OpenCL, etc. Article itself isn’t valuable much unless you know Chinese, but it has interesting poll included, with question “In addition to gaming performance,  which technologies are you interested in ?” and decent number of votes already.

Users put features like low noise and power consumption  (功耗、发热、噪音、节能) in the first place, DX11 support goes second, hardware accelerated PhysX on third place, Anti-aliasing (抗锯齿技术) comes fourth.