Evaluate PhysX support

[bknecht]

PhysX

PhysX is a hardware solution for physics. It is developed by Ageia, which has been bought by NVidia. PhysX is NOT open-source, but free to use. Read more about it on ​golem. The game ​Mirror's Edge supports PhysX as well. Watch the trailer ​here. Release date is in January 2009.

Task

Find out more about PhysX. Points of interest are the following:

• License: What happens to the Orxonox code when we support PhysX? Will we have to distribute PhysX-support of Orxonox separately in order to not corrupt the open-source-ness of Orxonox?
• Importance: Find out if physics based hardware is becoming a trend or is PhysX an isolated phenomenon?
• Linux-support: Check out if Linux supports this hardware. If there are no drivers available or if the support is rather limited, this project will become less important.

Create a Wiki page where you document your findings. Maybe discuss some points in the forum.

Start ​here to find out more about PhysX. There is also a ​Wikipedia page.

[rgrieder]

About the trend: Rumor has it that people start thinking that PhysX has no future. The main reason is that (I heard so) video cards start having on board physics. That would still be hardware physics, but not PhysX. So the general trend is going upwards I believe.

[bknecht]

Yes, I read similar things, but not about PhysX in specific. Thank you for the input. If video cards start supporting physics on a large scale, the subject is never the less important, and just has to be renamed to "hardware based physics support". I suspect however that there will be implementations we could use, if there is a trend towards hardware physics in general.

[dafrick]

Since now we use bullet for physics, this can probably be closed…

[bknecht]

Well, bullet is a software library and does not add or remove anything from hardware based physics.

PhysX was integrated into NVidia's CUDA system. During the last ThinkTank Meeting we discussed OpenCL which works similarly to CUDA and works on all graphic cards and not only for physics calculations.

We could either rename the ticket to "hardware based physics support" or "OpenCL implementation" and broaden the topic of the ticket. We could also close the ticket and open a new one concerning OpenCL.