The Future of Physics API’s ?

[Anonymous]

Just wondering what long-term impacts the purchase of Ageia by nVidia will have on commercial physics middleware (Havok), and non-commercial (ODE, Tokomak, etc.)

Is it too much of a dooms-day prophecy to foresee nVidia locking out the other Physics APIs from PPU/GPU to promote their own?

Is it likely that Havok and Intel will come up with some CPU hybrid, and CPU/PPU or some hydra-core processor with dedicated PPU access?

What else can we expect? Will Havok play nicer with educational bodies (non-commercial licenses and sdks)?

And in two years when all the dust settles, will this arms race begin once again with dedicated AI hardware? I know there is a crowd in Israel already working on dedicated hardware for pathfinding, graph traversal, D*, etc.

Is this to be the next iteration? If so, maybe its time to buy some shares. On second thought, that didn’t help the Ageia investors much…

Just my ramblings. Any thoughts?

[Anonymous]

Just some follow-up links on the AI Hardware Cards in case anyone was interested:

News Article about it:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1855137,00.asp

The "Ageia" of AI (apparently)
http://www.aiseek.com/

B.

[Anonymous]

Also of note in the Ageia aquisistion is th efact that last year NVidia developed proprietary technology for physics calculations (the "Quantum Effects" engine), so it’ll be interesting to see what happens next. I expect all sorts of GPU acceleration to the point that it becomes less of a video card and more of a powerful ‘utility’ card

[Anonymous]

more on this:

http://www.nordichardware.com/news,4749.html

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=4444

http://www.nordichardware.com/index.php?news=1&action=more&id=3967

Wow it looks like nVidia and Havok may have been coordinating about etching PhysX out of the scene!

NVIDIA and Havok partnered up this year claiming that SLI systems would get massive performance gains by utilizing additional GeForce GPUs as physics processors. Quantum may be the fruits of that partnership, though NVIDIA documentation clearly states that Quantum will work just fine without SLI.

NVIDIA’s documentation claims Quantum will specifically compete with AGEIA’s PhysX, yet does not mention who is providing the middleware. Given that there are only two acts in town right now, it would be safe to say Havok has a hand in the Quantum engine.
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[Anonymous]

http://gizmodo.com/357166/whats-next-in-graphics-cards-integrated-physics-processors

looks like nVidia are already adapting the PhysX kit to run on geforce 8’s

[Anonymous]

More on this:

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6157&Itemid=1

Apparently, the link above cites nVidia will not be releasing any new PhysX PPU’s.

Instead they are going to implement PhysX through CUDA.

Is ATI going to do similar with HAVOK?

[Anonymous]

I think AMD own ATI, so I doubt it!!

[Author]

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