Items tagged with physics
The concept of Time travel often comes up in a multitude of pop culture references, and it gets rather confusing with all the interpretations. If you begin to think about it, paradoxes and loopholes plague our understanding of how it all should work too. After all, it's science fiction is it not? Based on the math of a University of Queensland Australia undergrad, though, “Paradox-free time travel is theoretically possible,” so suck it pop culture. Could sci-fi again someday become reality? A fourth-year Bachelor of Advanced Science student, Gemain Tobar, decided to investigate the possibilities of time travel under the guidance of University of Queensland physicist...
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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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When Mountain View California start-up Ageia announced a new co-processor architecture for Desktop 3D Graphics that off-loaded the heavy burden physics places on the CPU-GPU rendering pipeline, the industry applauded what looked like the enabling of a new era of PC Gaming realism. Of course, on paper and in PowerPoint, things always look impressive, so we waited with baited breath for hardware to ship. That day has come and we've fully tested a new card shipped to us from BFG Tech, built on Ageia's new PPU. BFG's PhysX Physics Processing Card Is this technology evolutionary or revolutionary? You be the judge. We also invite you to "Digg" our...
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Without question, one of the hottest topics throughout the industry this year has been the advent of the discrete physics processor or "PPU" (Physics Processing Unit). Developed by a new startup company called Ageia, this new physics processor gives game developers the opportunity to create entirely new game-play characteristics that were not considered possible using standard hardware. Since its original inception, both CPU and GPU vendors have come to the spotlight to showcase the ability to process physics on their respective hardware. However, the Ageia PhysX PPU is the only viable solution which is readily available to consumers. For the foreseeable future, the only vendors...
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FiringSquad has posted some interesting comments from Havok concerning the physics in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and how it relates to Ageia's new physics card. Havok does not seem to be pulling any punches as they claim that the use of Ageia's discrete PPU does not offer any significant visual differences and typically offers a few hundred additional particles. They strengthen their grip around the neck of Ageia by claiming that the PPU actually slows down framerates as the CPU/GPU are now burdened with handling the added debris and effects. Rest assured, Hot Hardware will have the exhaustive review of the Ageia PPU in the very near future and Havok's claims...
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With all the recent news of AGEIA's PhysX chip floating around, ATI doesn't want you to forget about their processing power. As PC Perspective tells us, there's "a ton of new and interesting information" in their latest article. "First, the R580 has a tremendous amount of floating point capability with its 48 pixel shaders. ATI estimates that 375 GFlops for a single card and 750 GFlops for a CrossFire system are open for different processing models. Compared to a blazing fast modern CPU that has 10 GFlops of total floating point calculation capability, the GPU has tremendous opportunity. Interestingly, though no one outside AGEIA knows...
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AGEIA Brings First Dedicated Physics Processor To Market; Launches New Age in Interactive Gaming AGEIA's PhysX Processor Available Now in Select Dell, Alienware and Falcon Northwest Gaming Systems; Games Coming From More Than 60 Leading Software Developers and Publishers MOUNTAIN VIEW and SAN JOSE, Calif. – March 22, 2006 – AGEIA Technologies, Inc., the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced the availability of its PhysX processor, the first physics processing unit (PPU) designed to power pervasive real-time physics in PC gaming. With immediate availability from the world's leading gaming system and personal computer manufacturers Alienware, Dell, and Falcon...
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NVIDIA AND HAVOK DEMONSTRATE WORLD'S FIRST GPU-POWERED GAME PHYSICS SOLUTION AT GAME DEVELOPER'S CONFERENCE SANTA CLARA, CA—MARCH 20, 2006—NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in programmable graphics processor technologies, and Havok, the game industry's leading supplier of cross-platform middleware, will be demonstrating a physics effects solution that runs completely on a graphics processing unit (GPU) —an industry first—at this year's Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Jose, California (March 21st through 24th). The result of an ongoing engineering collaboration between Havok and NVIDIA, this new software product from Havok—called Havok...
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