But in March 2008, Nvidia announced that it will make PhysX an open standard for everyone, so the main graphic-processor manufacturers will have PhysX support in the next generation graphics cards. In February 2008, after Nvidia bought Ageia Technologies and eventually cut off the ability to process PhysX on the AGEIA PPU and NVIDIA GPUs in systems with active ATi/AMD GPUs, it seemed that PhysX went 100% to Nvidia. PCs with the cards already installed were available from system builders such as Alienware, Dell, and Falcon Northwest. ASUS, BFG Technologies, and ELSA Technologies were the primary manufacturers. The PhysX was available from three companies akin to the way video cards are manufactured. There is no cache-hierarchy like in a CPU or GPU. It consists of a general purpose RISC core controlling an array of custom SIMD floating point VLIW processors working in local banked memories, with a switch-fabric to manage transfers between them. Games wishing to take advantage of the PhysX PPU must use AGEIA's PhysX SDK, (formerly known as the NovodeX SDK). The first processor to be advertised being a PPU was named the PhysX chip, introduced by a fabless semiconductor company called AGEIA. Nvidia/Ageia no longer produces PPUs and hardware acceleration for physics processing, although it is now supported through some of their graphics processing units. The Ageia PPU is documented in depth in their US patent application #20050075849. The unit is most effective in accelerating particle systems, with only a small performance improvement measured for rigid body physics. This project was extended into a considerably more advanced ASIC-based system named HELLAS.įebruary 2006 saw the release of the first dedicated PPU PhysX from Ageia (later merged into nVidia). This was a simple FPGA based PPU that was limited to two dimensions. Several other technologies in the CPU-GPU spectrum have some features in common with it, although Ageia's product was the only complete one designed, marketed, supported, and placed within a system exclusively being a PPU.Īn early academic PPU research project named SPARTA (Simulation of Physics on A Real-Time Architecture) was carried out at Penn State and University of Georgia. The term was coined by Ageia to describe its PhysX chip.
The idea is having specialized processors offload time-consuming tasks from a computer's CPU, much like how a GPU performs graphics operations in the main CPU's place. It is an example of hardware acceleration.Įxamples of calculations involving a PPU might include rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics, collision detection, fluid dynamics, hair and clothing simulation, finite element analysis, and fracturing of objects. A physics processing unit ( PPU) is a dedicated microprocessor designed to handle the calculations of physics, especially in the physics engine of video games.
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