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
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