There are some major changes coming to the world of hardware, thanks to new developments with hardware physics. However with PhysX hardware just around the corner, I’d expect to see everything in the industry turned upside down pretty quickly.

Physics effects are just plain cool. Sure, games have technically had “physics” of some sort ever since the move to 3D, and in some cases even before. We’re talking basic hit detection, collision; the stuff that prevents you from walking through the walls in Doom and determines the hit-or-miss of your rocket launcher.

In recent years, physics has evolved to push games toward world simulation. Bad guys turn into “rag dolls” and tumble over rails and down stairs realistically, and often comically. Small game-world objects, and sometimes large ones, bump, tumble, fall, and otherwise react in a more or less convincing manner. The “physics gun” in Half-Life 2 recently hammered home for everyone just how nifty physics can be.

It’s still rather limited, though. The number of bodies that can be physically active in games is relatively small. Simulating cloth and fluids is difficult, if not impossible, to do in a believable and high-performance manner. With nearly every game—from RTS to RPG to FPS—incorporating fairly rich physics in one way or another, and with physics computation being such a highly parallel problem, it seems like the time is right for physics to be moved off the CPU and onto more suitable hardware.

Ageia is producing their PhysX hardware, Nvidia is working closely with Havok to do physics on graphics cards, and ATI is working on their own general solution. How are all these approaches different, and how will they impact you as a gamer? Source: ExtremeTech

Tags: hardware physics acceleration, world simulation, physics gun, rocket launcher