havok-clothing-demo-opencl-20090327-600In the latest “nTeresting Newsletter” from Brian Burke, PR guy for NVidia, he discusses the recent forays by AMD/ATI into GPU Accelerated Physics. I disagree that there hasn’t been “a peep” from AMD, as we covered the GPGPU accelerated Havok back in March and then the demonstration video.  But I do agree that NVidia has a far lead in OpenCL develoment over.. well, over everyone.

Right before mourning ‘the death of GPU physics’, AMD had the great idea that they would partner up with the Intel owned Havok Physics engine (I told you that was a bad idea).  Since then over a year has past and not a peep.  Until now.  Now their plan is “Bullet”.

“Bullet Physics Library is an open source physics library that is now getting translated into OpenCL, thanks to the effort of companies such as AMD [who offered support to developers]. Somehow, we feel that this announcement was the highlight of the launch event for the upcoming Evergreen generation of graphics cards.”

Reality is that AMD has no GPU driver for OpenCL and NVIDIA has had one for some time.  What does that really mean to people developing Bullet Physics for OpenCL?  Fudzilla asked the creator of the Bullet Physics, Erwin Coumans:

“Bullet’s GPU acceleration via OpenCL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA GeForce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner.”

NVIDIA is the leader for stereoscopic 3D, GPU physics, OpenCL, DirectCompute and GPU Computing. #1 with a Bullet.

NVidia is getting rave reviews for their amazing graphics & the PhysX support in Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I got to give NVidia credit for actually having their product (PhysX) in a game that’s actually available.  What’s your thoughts?

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