NVIDIA Quantum Physics?

by Sean Pelletier — Thursday, October 05, 2006, 09:11 AM EDT

DailyTech also has managed to uncover news regarding NVIDIA's upcoming Quantum Physics Engine. Slated to be released alongside the G80 GPU, NVIDIA will be announcing a new dedicated layer on the GPU which will be reserved for physics processing and be referenced as the "Quantum Physics Engine". Essentially, this new engine will allocate spare shaders towards physics processing. Obviously, the engine will scale well with SLI as there is a much larger pool of shaders though documents suggest that NVIDIA's physics processing can be done while using a single card as well. Given the history NVIDIA has in working with Havoc, it should be interesting to see the full speed and capabilities of this solution once it is made public.

Quantum utilizes some of the shaders from NVIDIA's G80 processor specifically for physics calculations. Physics calculations on GPUs are nothing new; ATI totes similar technology for its Stream Computing initiative and for the Triple Play physics. NVIDIA and Havok partnered up this year claiming that SLI systems would get massive performance gains by utilizing additional GeForce GPUs as physics processors. Quantum may be the fruits of that partnership, though NVIDIA documentation clearly states that Quantum will work just fine without SLI.

There's a thread in our forum on the topic right now if you'd like to air it out a bit on the topic.

Tags: Nvidia, physics, quantum, ICS, id

NVIDIA Quantum Physics?

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