What is PhysX in the video card?

PhysX, a set of physical computing engines developed by Ageia, in short, is to make objects in the virtual world conform to the physical laws of the real world so that the game is more realistic. PhysX can be computed by the CPU, but the program itself can also be designed to invoke separate floating-point processors (such as GPU and PPU) to compute, and because of this, it can easily perform physical simulations of large computational quantities like fluid dynamics simulations. The PhysX physical engine can be run on a full platform, including Windows,linux,xbox360,playstation3,mac.

The PhysX of the Ageia era

The PhysX physical computing engine was developed by five young technicians who set up the Ageia company. Since the PhysX physical engine is not designed to be CPU-specific, the Ageia company also designed specialized computing hardware for the PhysX engine, PhysX physical accelerator cards. The core of the PhysX physical accelerator card is called the PPU, the physical processor (physics processing unit). PPU has ceased production after the Ageia company was acquired by Nvidia.

The PhysX of the Nvidia era

Nvidia acquired the Ageia in 2008. Formally PhysX technology into its own. Nvidia PhysX is inherited from Ageia PhysX, but Nvidia has launched Nvidia PhysX physical acceleration on this basis and ported PhysX physical acceleration to the NVIDIA GPU. Users do not have to purchase additional PhysX physical accelerator cards to enjoy the PhysX physical acceleration function. Using the CUDA architecture, nvidia rewritten the PhysX physical accelerator, porting the PhysX physical acceleration engine from Ageia Ppu to the NVIDIA GPU.

The so-called PhysX physical acceleration means that the GPU speeds up the computation of the PhysX physical engine relative to the CPU. It's not that the PhysX engine can only be handled by the NVIDIA GPU.

Nvidia degraded CPU performs PHYSX efficiency

If you use CPU to process PhysX, the PhysX engine only invokes CPU single-threaded computations. David Kanter, author of the RealWorld Technologies website, uses Intel's vtune process viewing tool to analyze a variety of games that support physx effects, and finds that when these games use CPU to handle physical effects, Most of the code still uses the old x87 floating-point arithmetic instruction, rather than the much more efficient SSE instruction (the SSE instruction completes the same task at the rate of 1.5-twice times the x87 instruction).

Support for PhysX Games

Up to now, there are about 260 games using the PhysX engine on the full platform (pc,xbox,playstation). On the PC platform, there are 226 kinds of games using the PhysX engine (as of 2011.7.26).