A San Jose startup is building a "physics accelerator" for PCs that will contain hardware optimized for calculating realistic simulations of real-world physics — they hope that this will bridge the gap between general-purpose PCs and the specialized game-graphics cards in consoles.
Dubbed PhysX, the chip will enable things like gelatinous creatures whose bodies shift shape like a liquid, crumpling fenders in car crashes, massive explosions with 10,000 pieces of debris, clothing that hangs realistically, and lava or blood that flows like the real thing.
(via Pseudorandom)
Update: Thomas sez,
This card could lead into an interesting political conflict.
A huge amount of fast and accurate physics calculations is needed not only
for games, but also for development of modern weapons – calculations of
laminar and turbulent flow are important for everything from an implosion
of a nuclear payload to an aerodynamic behavior of its hypersonic carrier,
to design of fuel-air explosives. (Which, actually, is easier than games,
as you can go out for lunch while you run your calculations – something
unthinkable in the real-time world of computer games.)In the civilian world, the universities will be extremely happy for this
card. A device geared for normal consumer market, for normal consumer
price, will make a substantial number of cash-strapped theoretical
physicists happy as clams.Also, projects like the Protein Folding, are prime candidates for
harnessing the power of this kind of an accelerator.Not even mentioning bruteforcing of passwords, a task well-known for its
parallelism-friendliness.
