AMD interviewed about GPU gaming physics

Posted on Friday, February 18 2011 @ 16:16 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bit Tech had a chat with Manju Hedge from AMD's Fusion team about GPU gaming physics. Hedge is the co-founder of Ageia, he served as NVIDIA's CUDA VP before his switch to AMD last year.
However, last year Hegde was poached by AMD to join the Fusion team, prompting all sorts of speculation about AMD's plans for competing with PhysX. Before that, the company had also demonstrated OpenCL-accelerated Havok at GDC 2009, but we've heard little about this since. Just what went wrong with the concept of GPU-accelerated physics, what's AMD doing with Bullet Physics and will GPU physics ever really take off? We caught up with Hegde to probe his thoughts.

'I think one of the things I'm a little unhappy about is that, despite the tremendous amount of interest that we got out of Ageia, and all the hard work at Nvidia, physics is still not mainstream,' says Hegde. 'My whole point in starting Ageia was to make physics mainstream, so Nvidia has a few PhysX games - I was at Nvidia for a couple of years, and we did get a few games - but I can tell you that it's still not easy to get a game developer to use physics in a meaningful way.'
You can read the interview over here.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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