It's a matter of a significant acceleration of some (to all appearances, rather limited - PhysX does nothing but superfast calculations of collisions between game objects) set of typical 'physical' operations thanks to (1) maximum hardware optimization for such operations and (2) maximum efficient distribution of execution units of the physical coprocessor.Īn opportunity to have the same physical effects by using the same API on all the three main platforms of the new generation will certainly attract many game studios to PhysX. Summing up the above said, we can draw a conclusion that there are no new physical effects or algorithms. But in the latter case, PPU performance drops by a factor of 10^3.Īs such computations are, as a rule, executed with floating point numbers, PhysX is 'optimized' (according to Ageia meaning that we cannot check it up) for FP32 computations. In other words, PPU is lightning-fast at processing a huge number of collisions between game objects - spherical or more complex. Convex-convex (complex collisions): 533,000/sec max.Sphere-sphere collisions: 530 Million/sec max.PhysX chips officially have the following baseline features: What optimizations? Unfortunately, Ageia is rather indistinct about it. What features are hidden in this mysterious device? If we don't go into details (by the way, Ageia does not reveal them), PhysX is a processor, which more than 200 times as fast as modern CPUs in certain tasks thanks to its parallel architecture and intricate optimizations. The answer is obvious: none of the competitors produces hardware accelerators for computing physics. What does Ageia offer what Havok and its less famous competitors lack? In fact, I cannot say that computer games suffer from the lack of physical effects: you will hardly come across a game that doesn't use the physical engine Havok to this or that degree - an industrial standard de facto as its competing products leave the market. So, Ageia PhysX processors are designed for computations of physics in modern 3D games.

But at first let's review the 'physical' theory - as it's understood by Ageia. Today we are going to examine a production-line card PhysX P1 from ASUS. As PhysX PPU was announced at the traditional annual GDC 2005, no one had any doubts concerning the usage of the new coprocessors.Ī year after the announcement, on May 9, 2006, the first PhysX cards started to appear in stores. Ageia intends to introduce PPU to the CPU-GPU couple and free resources of these two processors from computing physics. On March 8, 2005, an unknown company, called Ageia, announced a new device type to be launched on the market: Physics Processing Unit, PPU.

Physx sdk vs havok