PhysX by Nvidia

A graphics card is an inherent component of any computer. It’s the hardware that has the responsibility of creating and putting up images onto the display. Normal, everyday things that are done on a computer don’t require high performing graphic cards. But when it comes to modern games, graphic cards have a huge task cut out for them. Modern video card companies (like Nvidia, ATI technologies, Intel, Realtek and many more)devote special attention to this gaming aspect, churning out high performance graphic cards which deliver a surreal gaming experience. This is where the term ‘hardware acceleration’ and consequently PhysX by Nvidia comes into picture. What follows is a must read for fellow gamers.

PhysX is a proprietary real-time physics engine middleware software development kit … blah... blah... blah….. . Simply put, it is a middleware that does the physics calculations involved in games, for the CPU, thus allowing the CPU much needed runtime memory to perform other tasks instead. This results in less frequent lags and hence a smoother game experience. This being hardware acceleration, is supported only by certain graphic cards. Also, only PhysX enabled games can be accelerated. But realizing its promising prospects, game developers are heavily investing in this technology, and bringing out more and more PhysX enabled games, because these middleware physics engines help in avoiding writing separate codes to handle the complex physics interactions involved in games.

Now coming to its history, PhysX as a software development kit was acquired by Aegia which itself was acquired by Nvidia in Feb 08. Then, Nvidia began integrating the engine into their CUDA framework. In August 08, Nvidia released drivers that allow GeForce 8 and above series graphic cards to implement PhysX.

Intel had also been working on hardware acceleration technology, but cancelled its project, named Havok FX. So, that leaves us with only PhysX as the sole available solution for physics hardware acceleration. Supported cards are, as mentioned before, CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU cards by Nvidia. We have tested PhysX acceleration on Nvidia GeForce G105M CUDA. A large pool of games are supported by PhysX. Some of them are Batman : Arkham Asylum, Crazy Machines II, Cryostasis, Mirror’s Edge and many more .