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Suggested books

If you are serious about nextgen shader programming, you should have this book next to your pillow! This third volume of the best-selling GPU Gems series provides a snapshot of today’s latest Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) programming techniques. The programmability of modern GPUs allows developers to not only distinguish themselves from one another but also to use this awesome processing power for non-graphics applications, such as physics simulation, financial analysis, and even virus detection—particularly with the CUDA architecture. Graphics remains the leading application for GPUs, and readers will find that the latest algorithms create ultra-realistic characters, better lighting, and post-rendering compositing effects

A complete guide to learning OpenGL. It covers all OpenGL functionality and goes further to GLUT. In the latest edition the book also covers the OpenGL Shading Language.

NVIDIA to Acquire AGEIA Technologies

0 February 6, 2008 at 1:05am by Harry Kalogirou

According to this press release, nVidia will acquire Ageia Technologies. Yeap! The well known physics software and hardware vendor. In my mind this means that the future nVidia based accelerators will support physics acceleration, too. It will basically mean the death of the PhysX processor, since the GPU can do that easily with no extra cost.

Actually the PPU solution was never to work. I find it quite hard to believe people would ever buy physics acceleration cards. So now we can enjoy accelerated physics using the already installed parallel processor in our system. However the use of PhysX concerns me a bit. I would feel much more comfortable with an open standard/API for physics. Something like OpenGL for graphics. But these things will have to move this way eventually. Just consider PhysX as the Glide of accelerated physics…

Technorati Tags: ageia, nvidia, physx, physics