Vendors Upgrade Their Physics Processing to Improve Gaming

The trend in computer gaming is always to provide higher performance and more realistic effects. However, even the best of today's games don't look realistic. With this in mind, graphics-engine vendors are looking for ways to improve the processing of the calculations necessary to create more realistic effects and interactions between players and game objects. CPUs running graphics-processing-engine software have performed the limited physics processing needed for computer games. Graphics-processing units (GPUs) handle the work necessary to actually render the images themselves. PPUs are good for complex games whose effects and interactivity entail a lot of physics. Nvidia uses Havok's FX physics engine to process physics on one or more Nvidia GPUs that are all on the same add-in board. With multiple GPUs, one chip can handle physics processing, while the rest perform graphics processing, or all the chips can share graphics and physics processing. ATI's approach works with Havok's FX engine and an add-in card with either one ATI GPU, a card with multiple GPUs, or multiple cards that each has more than one GPU. ATI uses the massively parallel pixel-processing portion of its GPUs to run the Havok FX engine