Nvidia's New Fluid Simulation Algorithm Allows Realistic Water Physics

People who are thinking nvidia's physx to be dead and defunct need to think twice. Its coming back even stronger than before with breakthrough advancements in real time physics effects. This new fluid simulation algorithm gives realistic water physics than any physics engine out there including havok's updated engine. Its purely technical so here's a quote:

A new fluid simulation algorithm (FSA) from PhysX appears to have made a breakthrough with its Position Based Fluids (PBF) technique that is based on the same Position Based Dynamics (PBD) framework used for simulating cloth and deformables in the PhysX SDK.

According to PhysX Info, PBD uses an "iterative solver" that allows it to "maintain incompressibility more efficiently than traditional SPH fluid solvers. It also has an artificial pressure term which improves particle distribution and creates nice surface tension-like effects (note the filaments in the splashes). Finally, vorticity confinement is used to allow the user to inject energy back to the fluid.

"

This is kind of a breakthrough for physics technology in producing realistic effects. Since a physics engine relies on complex macro operations and also favor parallel architectures,
gpu physics is moving into gpgpu direction. Talking about PHYSX, it does not use any old x87 instructions anymore but CUDA. I guess for these advancements, its one of the top middleware physics engine listed in Sony's middleware listing along with the new havok. Check here.

Ps4 is going to use PHYSX and this code will be processed by its radeon gpu. Maybe nvidia has made it open giving it an open-cl and x86 codepath to take advantage of PS4's HSA features. Its also coming back to PC with great guns cause pc,ps4 and next xbox are going to be cross-platform for most developers.

So guys, get ready for some exhilirating physx......errrr physics effects.

More info - Source

Lets see if Crysis 4 will use it to bring our pc's to knees.

^using physx to make a game more resource hogging is kinda dumb.

physx is something i can do without. but not graphics.

H

i would love to see some really liberal use of high end physics processing on half life 3. It would open the game to so much more.

so,if PS4 can make use of it then desktop radeon cards will also be able to make use of this.so it won't be nvidia only feature anymore.thats a good sign making things open source.

anirbandd said:
^using physx to make a game more resource hogging is kinda dumb.

physx is something i can do without. but not graphics.

No mate, it won't be like previous physx implementations.And physics is an integral part of graphics. All the next gen engines are going to follow this mantra.
Please read about HSA and unified memory. PS4 architecture mentioned in the console section will be good too. Desktop pc are all set to evolve into PS4 like starting from nvidia's maxwell gpu's.
So gpu physics is going to be common.

as long as they keep the code optimized for both sides am happy.

thanks god no more shitty console ports

H

avinandan012 said:
thanks god no more shitty console ports

thank sony for that.

vickybat said:
No mate, it won't be like previous physx implementations.And physics is an integral part of graphics. All the next gen engines are going to follow this mantra.
Please read about HSA and unified memory. PS4 architecture mentioned in the console section will be good too. Desktop pc are all set to evolve into PS4 like starting from nvidia's maxwell gpu's.
So gpu physics is going to be common.

yes... i was indicating to use of unbalanced use of physx coding and gfx.

if its optimised to run well on lower end cards + CPU [like my 7770 + i5], then it'll be a welcome change

[sarcasm] In 2020 PS5 and Xbox Next Next 360 will demo this.[/sarcasm]

yeah, i saw that video, graphics were awful (the water looked more like gel floating around

), but physics were impressive.. :-D

The restriction of PhysX not running in non-nVidia architecture is more of a superficial restriction than a real one. The current PhysX SDK is offering advanced X86 instruction support and Game developers for PC can implement PhysX to run smoothly on CPU using SSE, SSE2 and SSE3 instructions. But because of the HSA design, it will be more like distributed work load, being excecuted by both CPU and GPU as per the need. In case of a PC with Radeon card, I think nVidia will not allow it run on AMD cards and rather it will take the CPU execution path which will be optimized on that time.

Play Station 4 does not support CUDA or DirectCompute, so you have to live with OPenGL and OpenCL for Graphics and Compute respectively. Probably the console version of PhysX will use OpenCL for GPU Compute and will also offer CPU execution as per the need basis.

^^ Seconded.

PS4 has libgcm api which is modified version of open-gl. For gpu physics, its going to use open-cl.

S

looks beautiful