As good tradition, several interesting physical demos were presented during GTC Day 1 Keynote by Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President Content and Technology in NVIDIA.

First one was showing some high-fidelity smoke simulation, with particles interacting fully with characters, producing nice fluid and turbulent behaviour.

Second one, more impressive from our opinion – water simulation inspired by Lighthouse scene from Stanford Computer Science, but this time running in realtime, on one GPU.

Hybrid solver, based on heightfiled fluids and particles – very similar to the one in Raging Rapids Ride – was used.

Of course, those are just technical demos, but they are giving a good glimpse on what future games and future physics engines (PhysX SDK 3.x, anyone ?) may bring us.

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

User dolesistheboss uploaded nice HD video, showcasing PhysX Destruction demo from Jen-Hsun Huang GTC keynote. Description says:

The goal was to try and construct a wall similar to how it may be constructed on a movie set and break it apart in a realistic manor in real-time. In this scenario we chose to throw ragdolls at it to fracture and splinter bits and pieces off.

The demo uses PhysX 2.8.3 and a beta release of APEX Destruction.

During opening Keynote with Jen-Hsun Huang at GPU Technology Conference, several PhysX applications were used to demonstrate computing capabilities of new Fermi architecture. We are now able provide a little more details.

SPH-fluid simulation with Navier-Stokes solvers demo was built using 128 000 particles to create realistic realtime water behavior.

Update:

PhysX Wall Destruction demo is using APEX Destruction Module to simulate wall being destroyed by the impact of flying ragdolls. Over 10 000 rigid bodies represents debris and wall chunks – all being processed and fully self-shadowed by the GPU.

Update #2:

Video for PhysX fluid demo available

Update # 3:

PhysX Smoke Ball Demo is using a multigrid approach to simulate a realistic smoke behavior and is based on an Eulerian simulation accurate to the second order using 200.000 particles. All particles feature self shadowing throughout 200 shadow layers and are processed in real-time on the GPU.

Full PhysX demos video demonstration is accessible via GTC keynote webcast replay