CUDA and PhysX for BoB?

[Viking]

During Nvidia's fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Nvidia shed a little more light on its acquisition of Ageia and what it plans to do with the firm's PhysX technology. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang made no announcements regarding the deal until asked in the question-and-answer session, but he was happy to divulge a decent number of details.


Huang revealed that Nvidia's strategy is to take the PhysX engine and port it onto CUDA. For those not in the know, CUDA stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, and it's a C-like application programming interface Nvidia developed to let programmers write general-purpose applications that can run on GPUs. All of Nvidia's existing GeForce 8 graphics processors already support CUDA, and Huang confirmed that the cards will be able to run PhysX.



http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14147

Will we have it? Good or bad?

Viking

[Codex]

Will we have it? Good or bad?

I don't know if Oleg has stated if he would be using propriety physics API. I think he's coded is own.

As for PhysX...it was doomed from the start in terms of having a dedicated physics card. We now have quad core CPU's and GPU's that can crunch numbers via stream processing quicker than a Intel QX9770, why would you want to spend $$$ on a dedicated card?

This acquisition by nVidia might be Ageia's saving grace to keep the API alive, only problem I see is that the API may become hardware specific and that would be bad as Havok FX is not hardware specific and they've been around since Half Life 1.

[4./JG53_Task]

The PhysX card features were already available simply through the software. There was no need for the card whatsoever and that was proven before. NVidia is making it available through software, which further proves that.