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