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Opened 15 years ago

Closed 13 years ago

#293 closed task (wontfix)

Evaluate PhysX support

Reported by: bknecht Owned by: nobody
Priority: minor Milestone: Future Engine Features
Component: Physics/ODE Version:
Keywords: Cc:
Referenced By: References:

Description

PhysX

PhysX is a hardware solution for physics. It is developed by Ageia, which has been bought by NVidia. PhysX is NOT open-source, but free to use. Read more about it on golem. The game Mirror's Edge supports PhysX as well. Watch the trailer here. Release date is in January 2009.

Task

Find out more about PhysX. Points of interest are the following:

  • License: What happens to the Orxonox code when we support PhysX? Will we have to distribute PhysX-support of Orxonox separately in order to not corrupt the open-source-ness of Orxonox?
  • Importance: Find out if physics based hardware is becoming a trend or is PhysX an isolated phenomenon?
  • Linux-support: Check out if Linux supports this hardware. If there are no drivers available or if the support is rather limited, this project will become less important.

Create a Wiki page where you document your findings. Maybe discuss some points in the forum.

Start here to find out more about PhysX. There is also a Wikipedia page.

Change History (5)

comment:1 Changed 15 years ago by rgrieder

About the trend: Rumor has it that people start thinking that PhysX has no future. The main reason is that (I heard so) video cards start having on board physics. That would still be hardware physics, but not PhysX. So the general trend is going upwards I believe.

comment:2 Changed 15 years ago by bknecht

Yes, I read similar things, but not about PhysX in specific. Thank you for the input. If video cards start supporting physics on a large scale, the subject is never the less important, and just has to be renamed to "hardware based physics support". I suspect however that there will be implementations we could use, if there is a trend towards hardware physics in general.

comment:3 Changed 13 years ago by dafrick

Since now we use bullet for physics, this can probably be closed…

comment:4 Changed 13 years ago by bknecht

Well, bullet is a software library and does not add or remove anything from hardware based physics.

PhysX was integrated into NVidia's CUDA system. During the last ThinkTank Meeting we discussed OpenCL which works similarly to CUDA and works on all graphic cards and not only for physics calculations.

We could either rename the ticket to "hardware based physics support" or "OpenCL implementation" and broaden the topic of the ticket. We could also close the ticket and open a new one concerning OpenCL.

comment:5 Changed 13 years ago by bknecht

  • Resolution set to wontfix
  • Status changed from new to closed
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