Having purchased physics processor manufacturer PhysX last February, graphics card manufacturer NVIDIA has been hard at work porting system to run natively on the GeForce GPU rather than the dedicated chipset PhysX had been selling. Today, NVIDIA’s labors came to fruition as they released ForceWare 177.83, the first WHQL certified driver package with PhysX support included.
NVIDIA’s newly embedded PhysX runs on any GeForce 8-series, 9-series, and 200-series desktop graphics card, and simply require the new drivers to work. I imagine all future ForceWare packages will contain PhysX support.
The original PhysX system saw little support from the game development community, with only a handful of studios actually implementing the system into their games. The reason for this was obvious: it required a relatively expensive specialized hardware component to work, and how much of the marketplace would drop $200 on top of their system just for fancier physics? NVIDIA’s integration of PhysX into the heart of their GPU means an instantaneous surge of user base with hardware physics rendering support, which in turn means more game developers will start looking at integrating advanced physics systems like PhysX into their games.
I shouldn’t forget to mention that ForceWare 177.83 also supports CUDA, or Compute Unified Device Architecture, which allows software developers to execute code on the NVIDIA GPU just like they would a standard CPU. The performance advantage of running code against a GPU is staggering, and we’re just beginning to see the real world advantages of this technology with tools like the Folding@Home client.
If you own a GeForce 8 or newer, you can grab the new ForceWare drivers and a whole slew of demo games that take advantage of PhysX at NVIDIA’s new “ForceWithin” site.
Alternatively, you can download the drivers directly from here:
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