General Purpose Processing On Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU)
Hardware acceleration for physics processing is now usually provided by graphics processing units that support more general computation, a concept known as General Purpose processing on Graphics Processing Unit. AMD and NVIDIA provide support for rigid body dynamics computations on their latest graphics cards.
NVIDIA's GeForce 8 Series supports a GPU-based Newtonian physics acceleration technology named Quantum Effects Technology. NVIDIA provides an SDK Toolkit for what they call CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology that offers both a low and high-level API to the GPU. For their GPUs, AMD offers a similar SDK, called Close to Metal (CTM), which provides a thin hardware interface.
PhysX is an example of a physics engine that can use GPGPU based hardware acceleration when it is available.
Read more about this topic: Physics Engine
Famous quotes containing the words general, purpose and/or unit:
“There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.”
—Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)