AMD Talks GPU Gaming Physics

Ageia's original PhysX PPU didn't get much in the way of game support

Former Ageia co-founder and Nvidia CUDA VP Manju Hegde is now a VP on AMD's Fusion team

For a brief moment, it once looked like hardware-accelerated gaming physics had the potential to transform PC gaming's static rooms full of storage crates into dynamic worlds full of showering particles, rumpling cloth and realistically collapsing bridges. Co-founded by Manju Hegde, a new start-up called Ageia ambitiously launched its dedicated PhysX accelerator; a technology that's now a part of Nvidia's family, and it looked like gaming physics was about to completely overhauled.Glorious demos have been shown off, cash has been splurged and big promises have been made, but the truth is that really only a handful of PC games actually feature hardware-accelerated physics. What's more, those that do, such as Mafia 2 , mainly use it for particle eye-candy, rather than changing the actual game mechanics.However, last year Hegde was poached by AMD to join the Fusion team, prompting all sorts of speculation about AMD's plans for competing with PhysX. Before that, the company had also demonstrated OpenCL-accelerated Havok at GDC 2009, but we've heard little about this since. Just what went wrong with the concept of GPU-accelerated physics, what's AMD doing with Bullet Physics and will GPU physics ever really take off? We caught up with Hegde to probe his thoughts.says Hegde.Hardware-accelerated physics has been passed around all sorts of companies in its various forms. There was a lot of talk about a GPGPU-accelerated Havok engine, but then Intel bought Havok and we've only heard the odd murmur about it since. Then Nvidia bought Ageia, effectively tying the technology to its own CUDA hardware (from G80 onwards).However, we recalled an interview with Nvidia back in 2008, when Nvidia's director of public relations, Luciano Alibrandi, told us that the company wasadding that Nvidia would beWhy didn't AMD take up Nvidia's offer?says Hegde,