Muffin Man
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Nvidia Mulls Over Porting PhysX to OpenCL - X-bit labs
"Nvidia May Allow GPU PhysX to Work on ATI Hardware
Nvidia Corp. said that it could eventually port computing of physics effects created using PhysX middleware to OpenCL application programming interface (API) and capable hardware. This may actually enable acceleration of physics effects processing on graphics chips to work on ATI Radeon hardware.
At present PhysX middle-ware is used to make physics effects on various platforms, including video game consoles and personal computers. In virtually all the cases processing of physics effects is performed on the central processing units – x86 chips in case of PC, Cell in case of PlayStation 3 or PowerPC in case of Xbox 360 – however, there are handful of games that can take advantage of physics computing on Nvidia GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs) that support CUDA technology. The latter is virtually Nvidia's proprietary API and is naturally not supported by chips developed by ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices. Due to such limitations not a lot of game developers are implementing GPU PhysX and enabling acceleration using DirectCompute or OpenCL is one of the best ways to popularize processing of physics effects on graphics processors.
“In the future it is a possibility that we could use OpenCL, but at the moment CUDA works great. [Our GPU] architecture allows for acceleration by other things like OpenCL. Nvidia works very closely with The Khronos Group, actually Neil Trevett is president of the group and he's part of Nvidia, so we've been driving that standard also, and it's an excellent standard,†said Nadeem Mohammad, a director of PhysX product management at Nvidia, in an interview with Bit-tech web-site.
Porting PhysX to OpenCL is a natural thing to do since the standard is supported both by central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, hence, this would make PhysX middle-ware much more universal, something, which is important to compete against providers of competing engines, such as Havok, a division of Intel Corp.
However, Mr. Mohammad warned about possible performance issues with non-Nvidia hardware, claiming that ATI is much behind Nvidia when it comes to GPU computing.
“If we start using OpenCL, then there's a chance that the features would work on ATI, but I have no idea what the performance would be like. Previously, looking at things like Folding@home, ATI GPU computing performance seems to be behind Nvidia. That probably reflects the fact that their GPU computing solution is probably a couple of generations behind ours,†said Mr. Mohammad.
Nvidia did not elaborate when it plans to port PhysX to OpenCL."
"Nvidia May Allow GPU PhysX to Work on ATI Hardware
Nvidia Corp. said that it could eventually port computing of physics effects created using PhysX middleware to OpenCL application programming interface (API) and capable hardware. This may actually enable acceleration of physics effects processing on graphics chips to work on ATI Radeon hardware.
At present PhysX middle-ware is used to make physics effects on various platforms, including video game consoles and personal computers. In virtually all the cases processing of physics effects is performed on the central processing units – x86 chips in case of PC, Cell in case of PlayStation 3 or PowerPC in case of Xbox 360 – however, there are handful of games that can take advantage of physics computing on Nvidia GeForce graphics processing units (GPUs) that support CUDA technology. The latter is virtually Nvidia's proprietary API and is naturally not supported by chips developed by ATI, graphics business unit of Advanced Micro Devices. Due to such limitations not a lot of game developers are implementing GPU PhysX and enabling acceleration using DirectCompute or OpenCL is one of the best ways to popularize processing of physics effects on graphics processors.
“In the future it is a possibility that we could use OpenCL, but at the moment CUDA works great. [Our GPU] architecture allows for acceleration by other things like OpenCL. Nvidia works very closely with The Khronos Group, actually Neil Trevett is president of the group and he's part of Nvidia, so we've been driving that standard also, and it's an excellent standard,†said Nadeem Mohammad, a director of PhysX product management at Nvidia, in an interview with Bit-tech web-site.
Porting PhysX to OpenCL is a natural thing to do since the standard is supported both by central processing units (CPUs) and GPUs, hence, this would make PhysX middle-ware much more universal, something, which is important to compete against providers of competing engines, such as Havok, a division of Intel Corp.
However, Mr. Mohammad warned about possible performance issues with non-Nvidia hardware, claiming that ATI is much behind Nvidia when it comes to GPU computing.
“If we start using OpenCL, then there's a chance that the features would work on ATI, but I have no idea what the performance would be like. Previously, looking at things like Folding@home, ATI GPU computing performance seems to be behind Nvidia. That probably reflects the fact that their GPU computing solution is probably a couple of generations behind ours,†said Mr. Mohammad.
Nvidia did not elaborate when it plans to port PhysX to OpenCL."