Maximum PC physics RSS Feed

Hackers Crack the Code to Allow Non-Nvidia GPUs to Run PhysX

Paul Lilly — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 13:54:56 -0500

One surefire way to egg on the hacking community is to place ever increasing restrictions on your product, essentially daring black hat coders to find a back door. Nvidia is finding this out the hard way, after the GPU maker modified its latest PhysX drivers to prevent any non-Nvidia GPU from working, says news and rumor site The Inquirer.

And if that weren't enough, the latest version of PhysX also prevents physics processing unit (PPU) cards from working if it detects a non-Nvidia card in the system. That may have been the proverbial straw that broke the hacking community's back, and a hacker who goes by the handle GenL has put together some experimental code that stops Nvidia's drivers from shutting everything down when it detects a Radeon card.

We haven't tried it ourselves, but if you're feeling adventurous, rebellious, or both, you can grab the code here.

Unscientific Poll: Gamers Don't Care about PhsyX

Paul Lilly — Thu, 07 May 2009 10:07:23 -0500

Several upcoming titles have announced support for Nvidia's hardware PhysX, which could be good news for the GPU maker. However, up until this point, games supporting PhysX have been a mixed bag, perhaps leading to a sense of apathy among gamers. Or at least that's what AnadTech's newest poll seems to suggest.

When asked how important hardware PhysiX acceleration is in buying software, 52 percent of the nearly 9,000 respondents said it was only "Marginal; PhysX is a bonus if a game I like supports it." Thirty-one percent took it a step further calling PhysX 'Not useful,' and 3 percent said it was "Detrimental." Only 13 percent found PhysX 'Useful,' 'Important,' or 'Very Important.'

Things weren't much better (for Nvidia) when the same question was asked about making a hardware buying decision. A slightly less 79 percent of respondents found PhysX to be anywhere from a marginal to detrimental marketing bullet. And the responses weren't overly swayed by ATI videocard owners, either. According to current poll results, 52 percent of respondents own an Nvidia card with support for PhysX.

You can take the poll here.

Nvidia Releases OpenCL Driver, SDK

Paul Lilly — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:00:00 -0500

Earlier this year, Maximum PC Editor-in-Chief Will Smith challenged Nvidia "to stop trying to convince us that closed APIs are good, and instead embrace OpenCL." Fast forward to today and the graphics chip maker still isn't ready to kill CUDA, but it did become the first to release an OpenCL driver and Software Development Kit (SDK) in pre-beta form. Nvidia says its goal is to solicit early feedback in anticipation of a beta release to be made available in coming months.

"The OpenCL standard was developed on Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia was the first company to demonstrate OpenCL code running on a GPU," said Tony Tamasi, senior VP of technology and content at Nvidia. "Being the first to release an OpenCL driver to developers cements Nvidia's leadership in GPU Computing and is another key milestone in our ongoing strategy to make the GPU the soul of the modern PC."

If you haven't been following along at home, OpenCL is short for Open Computing Language and is an open programming framework paving the way for developers to tap into the power of GPUs for general-purpose computing, otherwise known as GPGPU (General Purpose GPU). The open standard has the potential to work on most modern GPUs, and not just Nvidia hardware like the company's CUDA platform. But don't read this as Nvidia giving up on CUDA. On the contrary, Nvidia feels OpenCL reinforces the ideas behind CUDA, and has bumped up the CUDA release schedule to include three releases planned for 2009.

AMD and Havok Demo OpenCL

Andy Salisbury — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:42:44 -0500

At this month’s GDC AMD and Havok teamed up to show off the latest advances in their development of OpenCL, a new programming language that will allow physics processing to swap from the CPU to GPU on the fly.

The concept behind OpenCL is simple; it’s a system that will allow the load from physics processing to shift from different pieces of hardware on the fly. For example, if a gamer has a high end GPU but a slower processor, OpenCL can detect this and move a bulk (if not all) of the physics processing to the GPU, alleviating some of the stress from the CPU. And this system works vice versa, for slower GPUs but high end CPUs.

What’s even better is that OpenCL will work across all platforms. While PhysX currently only works with Nvidia GPU’s, OpenCL will work with AMD and Intel processors, as well as Nvidia and ATI GPUs. So, no more concerns about compatibility!

Sadly, at GDC the demo that was on display was only on an individual piece of hardware, the switch between CPU to GPU wasn’t shown. AMD was clear to state that their demo was only a proof-of-concept, and that the development process is still ongoing.

Image Credit: Havok Destruction Demo

Virginia Releases First Open-Source Textbook

David Murphy — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 14:15:26 -0600

Open-source software and hardware are common elements of the technological world. And now the ancient counterparts to these modern products, written books, have finally jumped the gap into open waters as well. Virginia's currently accepting public comments for its first-ever open-source school textbook, "21st Century Physics FlexBook: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies."

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike, the project ran from concept to creation in a little under four months. That's an impressive amount of time for the creation of a full textbook. Thirteen members from Virginia's K-12 physics community joined up with university and industry volunteers across a number of states to develop the book's eleven chapters. And each chapter was given no less than three peer reviews from college professors, related authors, and high school and college students.

As for the "flexbook" part, Virginia officials define that as, "an adaptive, web–based set of instructional materials, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (CC–BY–SA) and thus can be used as is, used in part, or enhanced by teachers based on their curriculum and classroom needs." In short, it's a book that's both Web- and print-based, which you can share-alike and modify so long as you include the original licensing.

The advantages of this method are twofold: Not only does it encourage a faster production time versus the standard textbook model, but it allows the book's users to draft supplements and add-ons, as well as extract key areas and create additional texts using the material without needing to jump through a ton of copyright hoops. For example, teachers could use the book as baseline, customizing the written contents to their exact methods and plans. Or better, educators would no longer need to rely on a publishing house's lead time and could instead update the contents of the book themselves, perhaps even to the point where their contributions would be included in a scheduled revision.

The obvious extension of Virginia's project involves taking this concept to the collegiate level. Just imagine: instead of undergraduates relying on expensive textbooks that are already outdated by the completion of their course, they could use open-source materials created by a conglomeration of professors across a wide range of universities. While there would likely be additional time to factor in, given the greater complexity of an average college textbook versus a K-12 primer, open-source courseware would be a novel way to integrate a large sum of knowledge into an easily updatable format. And it would be cheaper to produce and acquire than an average textbook.

The only question? Who's going to get paid for the work? Furthering the sum of human knowledge is an admirable goal, but putting food on the dinner table at the end of a long day is equally noteworthy. If open-source coursework seeks to attract the attention and time of a greater body of intellectuals, how can these contributors--likely burdened with their own research and classes--be compensated for their contributions to a free project? What kind of paid-for services could be tacked onto an open-source book?

Will ATI Play Nice?

Justin Kerr — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:56:49 -0500

Recently in both the print and online versions of Maximum PC we looked at Nvidia’s CUDA API and what a GP-GPU future might look like. The one wild card in this equitation is the other big player in the graphics card market, ATI. Will ATI play nice by supporting CUDA and licensing PhysX? Or will it go its own way, a result which may end up killing both companies initiatives.

GP-GPU

Nvidia’s CUDA may not be open source, but it is free. ATI or other companies can easily write apps for the API or implement the functionality into its drivers, but will they? Of course not! The dollar cost may be free, but adopting the format means ATI loses control over the future of GP-GPU computing. ATI openly admits it is currently hard at work with its StreamSDK and Brook+ implementations and its future only takes it further from CUDA. I could write an entire article on the differences between the different approaches but suffice it to say, this is one area where consumers would benefit from a common platform. To prove my point we need only look at the PC gaming market in general. Does anyone actually think we would have been better off with 30 different non Microsoft operating systems and no DirectX? Developers need standards and it is up to hardware manufacturers to make this happen.

Physics

Inside sources at Nvidia have also confirmed that ATI can license its PhysX technology for pennies per GPU. ATI on the other hand, has shown no indication that it will do so and ATI has warmed up to the competing Havok solution owned by Intel. As a result the physics scene chaotic as it is will be slow to mature. Choosing between competitors for a physics solution must be no easy task. By siding with Intel, ATI is making a strategic decision that leaves the market divided. In fact, I would speculate that Nvidia’s low licensing fee is an attempt to seed the market with more PhysX compatible hardware to earn a dominate market share.

Conclusion

GP-GPU computing is still a long way out for mainstream users, but it shows incredible promise for many tasks which currently fall under the arduous category such as video transcoding. Additionally, physics acceleration could revolutionize the gaming experience. With these features combined, the graphics card of the future may be far more valuable than it is today. Unfortunately, the revolution may be held up in competing technologies that end up hurting the cause they are fighting for.

Daily News Brief: Where all the Cool Kids get their Tech News!

Paul "One4yu2c" Lilly — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 20:27:13 -0500

Intel Eyes up Physics

Ageia's PhysX accelerator promises to deliver a "rich immersive physical gaming environment," but both a lack of widespread developer support and limited benefits in games that do support physics pcoressing have prevent Ageia from gaining a signficant foothold in the gaming community. On top of that, their window of opportunity might be closing, as both ATI and nVidia have taken interests in physics with planned solutions of their own. Potentionally raining on everyone's parade, Intel announced they've reached an agreement to purchase physics software developer Havok. The impending acquisition throws Intel squarely into the fray, while also giving them leverage against potentional competitors. ATI's Crossfire and nVidia's SLI physics solutions both use the Havok FX engine, with Intel soon to be sitting at the driver's seat.

Vista Laptops Shipped with Virus

But it gets even better. The Virus Bulletin reports that anywhere between 10,000 and 100,000 shipments of laptops sold in Danish and German branches by Aldi have been found to be infected with a boot sector virus called Stoned.Angelina, a virus first detected 13 years ago and apparently still making the rounds. Because the laptops are sold without floppy drives, the 1990s isn't likely to spread, but there's certainly enough egg to go around on company heads, including Microsoft, Bullguard (the pre-installed anti-virus software that failed to catch the virus), and Aldi. For any of our international readers who may have been infected, you can find removal instructions here.

Newsflash: Interweb is Popular

Not that we needed any more proof the internet age is upon us, but come this November, a new show called Quarterlife will make its debut on MySpace. From the creative minds behind Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, Marshall Herskovitz's and Ed Zwick's newest endeavor will only air online. The new show, which focuses on a group of recent collget grads, will also bring with it their own social networking site (Quarterlife.com), where they envision fans will bantor about the show and recruit other viewers.

Chinese Gamer Dies of Exhaustion

This headline's becoming a recurring theme, so much so that the Chinese government have launched gaming curfews, shut down over 12, 575 cafes, refused to license new cafes for the remainder of 2007, and issuing mandatory time limit penalties for online games. And yet, another internet gamer dies from exhaustion. The 30 year old from Guangzhou died after three consecutive days of gaming, and despite all the restrictions and regulations, he probably won't be the last person to make a gaming death related headline.

Hackers Cash In

We've all the read the stories involving stolen bank account information and other private data falling into the wrong hands, but what do hackers do with all this data after they mine it? They sell it online in a thriving underground trade. According to Symantec's latest report on cyber crime, hijacked credit cards make up 22 percent of all advertisements in the underground economy, with bank accounts close behind at 21 percent. Stolen bank accounts can fetch up to $400 each, with email passwords commanding anywhere from $1 to $350. And even if you avoid online banking sites and other financially based services, you could still be at risk. According to William Beer, director of security practice for Europe, social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are drawing an increasing number of attacks.

Tri-Core on the Horizon?

File this one under rumors, but there's some buzz that AMD may release a triple core processor. Releasing a tri- core chip would be one way to salvage a defective quad-core part rather than toss it into the garbage bin. But Charlie Demerjian at the The Inquirer has a different take, and believes AMD would consider this approach primarily for the marketing advantage. It would be a lot more difficult for Intel to create a tri-core part with the current Core 2 architecture, leaving AMD as the only option for those wanting such a chip. The question is, does a market really exist for such a processor? Possibly, but quad-core parts can already be picked up at mainstream pricing, and it won't be long until budget offerings trickle into the lineup too.

Valve and Crytek won’t support PhysX any time soon

Michael Brown — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:34:05 -0500

id Software’s John Carmack gave Ageia some physics action—in the form of turbulence—when he told bootdaily.com that he is “…not a believer in dedicated PPUs.” But it looks as though neither Valve nor Crytek—developers of two other important game engines—are prepared to join the PhysX faithful, either.

The limited installed base of PhysX cards is one of the biggest hurdles for Valve. “We all hate cliché’s,” says Valve’s director of marketing, Doug Lombardi, “but it’s the chicken-or-the-egg problem. The current designs for a PPU (physics-processing unit) offer some advantages in what can be achieved technically. But there’s a bigger question mark with respect to adoption rate, and that has a real-world impact on how many games support them.”

Asus and BFG are the only hardware manufacuters offering PhysX cards today.

Crytek’s Cevat Yerli, executive producer and director of Crysis, points out another problem with supporting a physics processor: The need to create a gaming experience that’s different enough from what’s possible on mainstream hardware to justify the gamer’s investment in the hardware without making an entirely different game for the majority of gamers who don’t have the hardware.

In an interview with Maximum PC’s editor-in-chief Will Smith, for an October issue cover story, Yerli says “We are not supporting GPU or dedicated physics processors for a variety of reasons. The main one is that we did not want to change the core gameplay physics for our min-spec configurations. We have been optimizing our dynamics code for many years now, so it can run robust and as optimally as it can on CPUs of previous generations while also taking advantage of newer multi-core architectures. So you are best equipped with a quad core—if you have the budget—but Crysis will do great on dual-core configurations as well.”

Ageia’s executives, meanwhile, argue that the best hardware for accelerating physics is a processor specifically designed for that application. As Ageia’s vice president of marketing, Michael Steele, puts it: “A truly large-scale physics solution that enables developers to add lots of physically simulated primitives into their games requires hardware that is massively multi-core—we’re talking tens to hundreds of cores. It takes high amounts of floating-point throughput, on par with the [IBM/Sony/Toshiba] Cell processor. It takes highly independent processing to handle the irregular nature of physics—GPUs don’t have this. And it takes high amounts of memory bandwidth—CPUs don’t have this.”

CPU cores have been designed to each execute single-thread programs as fast as possible, and their cache systems are optimized for such operations. The AGEIA PhysX processor has been designed to optimize the execution of many parallel threads of mixed integer and floating-point operations with high entropy data access. On so many dimensions, multi-core CPUs fall short.”

Valve’s Lombardi doesn’t necessarily disagree with Steel’s views, allowing that “…the current designs for a PPU offer some advantages in what can be achieved technically.” And as he points out, physics helped move lot of copies of Half-Life 2. “Players told us with their dollars that this was an important move forward,” says Lombardi. “Subsequently, we’re investing to expand the physics simulation systems of the Source engine and are always evaluating the scope of hardware that will best bring these experiences to life.”

But we gather that PhysX won’t be within that scope in the near future, because as Lombardi points out, other alternatives—primarily multi-core CPUs—already enjoy more market- and mindshare: “When the GPU was the big new idea, it just wasn’t possible to achieve what Mr. Carmack did with GL Quake and what others were doing to pioneer advanced graphics via any of the existing pieces of the PC of that era,” says Lombardi. “Physics routines such as those in Half-Life 2 were achieved in 2004 on millions of non-PPU enabled PCs. Today, multi-core CPUs are opening the door for advanced AI, advanced physics, wildly faster performance, and more—and it’s shipping in just about every new PC being made.”

Does this lack of key developer support spell doom for Ageia? Not necessarily. After all, they still have Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 3 in their corner. All they need now is that one killer app that will make everyone a believer. As Lombardi puts it “It’s going to require something truly wicked that’s only possible on a PPU to move customers and developers to it.”