Items tagged with physics
At this point, it seems inevitable that whenever NVIDIA reveals a new GeForce series, the company will have a number of cool tech demos on-hand to help sell us on what it can do, and tease us on what's coming to gaming. Unfortunately, many of these tech demos remain internal at NVIDIA, but there is the odd one that the company packages up and lets loose. One example is the Apollo 11 demo that we talked about a couple of months ago, one that takes great advantage of Voxel Global Illumination (VXGI). Well, I hope that the Apollo 11 demo satiates your appetite, because the following preview of NVIDIA's PhysX FleX features are exclusive to the following video. It's really too bad, because some of...
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Videogames often get a bad rap for rotting our brains, creating violence or simply wasting our time, but as anyone with a sensible mind undoubtedly knows, there's a lot of good to come from them as well. A perfect example comes to us this weekend from Google's quantum AI lab team. It involves Minecraft and a whole lot of advanced physics. It'll likely come as a surprise to no one reading this that Minecraft has been the tool used to build some incredible things. We're not just talking the Starship Enterprise here, or a mega-sized Mario, but tools that actually work - conveyor belts, calculators, or even a printer (YouTube is chock-full of such creations). Google recognizes the potential here...
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If you possess the unique combination of characteristics that allow you be both incredibly precise and focused on specific physics problems yet daydreamy enough to stare up at the night sky and wonder “What if?”, you might work for NASA, and you might also be Harold G. White, a NASA physicist who’s researching the possibilities of warp drive travel. (That is, faster than the speed of light.) White has been researching warp travel in a NASA lab, attempting to warp the trajectory of a photon and thus change the distance it travels within a defined area. White’s team is measuring any change with a highly sensitive interferometer in a “floating” lab built on pneumatic...
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Faster than the speed of light? Normally we think of The Flash, Superman, or perhaps a Federation starship using warp drive. In other words, we think science fiction or comic books. After all, surpassing that speed would overturn one of the fundamental laws of physics, Einstein's theory of relativity, often simply known by the equation E = mc2. However, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, believe they have discovered subatomic particles called neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. That said, with physics potentially about to be turned upside down, the scientists are so astounded by the discovery that they are asking others to verify them. Antonio...
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A few months back, NVIDIA demoed its upcoming quad-core SoC for future tablets and related mobile devices, dubbed Kal-El. At the time, NVIDIA claimed that Kal-El would deliver 5x the performance of current Tegra 2 solutions and ship with a 12-core GeForce GPU as well. And now, NVIDIA is showing off Kal-El again, but this time with an impressive graphics and physics demonstration that really shows off what the chip can do. “Given that dual-core processors are already on market, you might be wondering how Project Kal-El’s quad-core technology will improve the mobile experience. Rather than try to explain it, we’ve put together a hands-on demo to give you a sneak peek at the new...
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When it comes to hardware-accelerated PhysX and the future of GPGPU computing AMD and NVIDIA are the modern-day descendents of the Hatfields and McCoys. Both companies attended GDC last week, where a completely predictable war broke out over PhysX, physics, developer payoffs, and gamer interest in PhysX (or the lack thereof). The brouhaha kicked off with comments from the senior manager of developer relations at AMD, Richard Huddy, who said: "What I’ve seen with physics, or PhysX rather, is that Nvidia create a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game...I’m not aware of any GPU-accelerated PhysX code which...
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As death threats preceded the startup of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) last year, one might not be surprised at foul play as testing is performed prior to the restart of the LHC. But fowl play? The LHC has been out of action for over a year, due to a helium leak that caused it to be shut down on September 19th of last year, nine days after its start-up. With the LHC repaired, scientists have been running tests in anticipation of a restart later this month. However, the testing process was halted on Monday after the power to the LHC failed. A CERN spokeswoman, Christine Sutton, said scientists discovered fowl play:"The problem related to the high voltage supply. We get mains voltage from the...
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AMD Demonstrates Optimized Executions of Havok Middleware on AMD platforms – Balanced Platform of CPU + GPU Processing Delivers Optimal Game Experience – SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. - March 26, 2009 - Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD) and Havok, the premier provider of interactive software for physics simulation and content development, are presenting new, optimized executions of Havok’s physics middleware on AMD platforms at the 2009 Game Developers Conference. The demonstrations include the first OpenCL supported execution of Havok Cloth. Havok offers a complete modular suite of products that help visual and interactive content developers create more realistic games and cinematic special...
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I know you slept through quantum physics class. Your snoring woke me up. Luckily, Someone at Magiq Technologies, among other people, was sitting up straight and taking notes. And they think they can make the next generation of data encryption essentially impregnable by using those pesky photons from page 234 in the textbook we didn't read either: Magic combines a computer, a finely tuned laser, a photon detector, and a fiber-optic line. The laser inside the Magiq QPN box is adjusted to produce single photons, which are then sent over the fiber-optic cable to a second QPN box, which detects them and notes precisely their time of arrival....
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DailyTech also has managed to uncover news regarding NVIDIA's upcoming Quantum Physics Engine. Slated to be released alongside the G80 GPU, NVIDIA will be announcing a new dedicated layer on the GPU which will be reserved for physics processing and be referenced as the "Quantum Physics Engine". Essentially, this new engine will allocate spare shaders towards physics processing. Obviously, the engine will scale well with SLI as there is a much larger pool of shaders though documents suggest that NVIDIA's physics processing can be done while using a single card as well. Given the history NVIDIA has in working with Havoc, it should be interesting to see the full speed and...
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Confused about effects physics vs. gameplay physics? [H] has asked ATI, NVIDIA, Havok, and Ageia about the two. They received in-depth responses providing great detail regarding effects and gameplay physics, what they mean for gameplay, and current hardware physics abilities. "After digesting all of these great replies from the players in the physics market, here is what we come up with. There are big definitional differences between effects physics and gameplay physics as you might have expected, but much of the forum banter you have seen people prop up as fact, is just simply bad information at best, and lies at worst."...
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Scott from the Tech Report just sent word of a new article where he takes a look at Ageia's PhysX PPU. In typical TR fashion, there's plenty of technical detail, but unfortunately there isn't much performance data due to the lack of software to support the device. Here's our take on the PhysX PPU from a few weeks back. "I'VE HAD THE CHANCE to spend a few days playing with a PhysX card from Ageia, and there is much to tell, though not much one can do with the hardware just yet. I did find some interesting ways to test the PhysX card, and the results may enlighten us about the prospects for physics acceleration...
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ATI announced today their plans for "boundless gaming" which includes new hardware physics acceleration. To those interested in seeing how the ATI cards perform physics, Tweak Town has coverage of the ATI presentation at Computex, which demonstrated their "True-to-Life Gaming Reality". They also posted a short video of a physics demo. Check out the article here. ...
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GamePC labs has a review posted this morning of BFG's AGEIA PhysX card. Lots of good information in this review, along with some some insightful opinions and commentary. We've also taken a look at this card. For another reference point, you can read our article right here. "The problem is not the hardware. After seeing the demos, we know that the hardware is capable of some amazing effects and certainly, physics hardware acceleration will be the next frontier in PC gaming. However, the issue is timing. The cards are here, but there is no killer title to drive sales of the cards. To take an example which has been used a thousand times already, there is no "GLQuake "title to drive...
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