Nvidia Physx

PhysX is a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK acquired by Ageia (which itself was acquired by Nvidia in February 2008) with the purchase of ETH Zurich spin-off NovodeX in 2004. The term PhysX can also refer to the PPU add-in card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled video games. Video games supporting hardware acceleration by PhysX can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU (which has at least 32 CUDA cores), thus offloading physics calculations from the CPU, allowing it to perform other tasks instead — resulting in a smoother gaming experience and additional visual effects.

Middleware physics engines allow game developers to avoid writing their own code to handle the complex physics interactions possible in modern games.

The PhysX engine and SDK are available for the following platforms:

Apple Mac OS X

Windows

Linux (32-bit)

Nintendo Wii

Sony PlayStation 3

Microsoft Xbox 360

Nvidia provides both the engine and SDK for free to Windows and Linux users and developers.The PlayStation 3 SDK is also freely available due to Sony's blanket purchase agreement.

A physics processing unit (PPU) is a dedicated microprocessor designed to handle the calculations of physics, especially in the physics engine of video games. Examples of calculations involving a PPU might include rigid body dynamics, soft body dynamics, collision detection, fluid dynamics, hair and clothing simulation, finite element analysis, and fracturing of objects. The idea is that specialized processors offload time consuming tasks from a computer's CPU, much like how a GPU performs graphics operations in the main CPU's place.

The first PPUs were the SPARTA and HELLAS.

The term was coined by Ageia's marketing to describe their PhysX chip to consumers. Several other technologies in the CPU-GPU spectrum have some features in common with it, although Ageia's solution is the only complete one designed, marketed, supported, and placed within a system exclusively as a PPU.