When will CUDA be available?

[hat]

CUDA is a physics technology where I can use my 8500gt to render physics operations and possibly gain performance right? Can I use the 8500gt with my 8600gts with CUDA?

[wolf]

i believe you can use any combination of CUDA enabled cards, which is any 8-9 series card so far. yes it "should" increase performance, given Solaris says even a normal physx card does, and he's a no bs kinda dude.

hopefully we'll be looking at the next few months at the latest, as it was announced ages ago, and recently theres been rumors that its nearing completion.

[largon]

nVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is, as the name gives away, more than a physics API. CUDA itself is out there already. Since nVIDIA now own rights to PhysX physics codec they are planning on releasing a derivate of PhysX engine compatible with CUDA.

I don't care about a performance increase from dedicated physics processing - I want games to feature life-like physics. I'd love to see the feeble physics engines used in modern games (like Crysis) to be made obsolete by the CUDA-based PhysX codec.

iirc, nV has said just some weeks ago that the conversion project is almost complete.

[calvary1980]

the only titles that will support PhysX CUDA are future ones and it's soley based on Developers, think of the advantage it would give nVidia over ATI I don't think many Developers would be on board for this I think they rather use a General Physics Engine like Havok. No older Engines will get an update that includes Crysis, they would have to rewrite everything and that is outside the realm of a patch. just not happening.

- Christine

[largon]

Hence the wording "physics engines used in modern games (like Crysis) to be made obsolete". CUDA is an open platform btw, so ATi GPUs can use it too. Havok is good but it's inferior to PhysX. And it'll take years before Intel can offer the hardware that can achieve the same as ATi/nV can "tomorrow" with CUDA PhysX.

[wolf]

i cant wait, i have 2x8600GT and an 8800GT waiting to be physics processors, i really want to see what differences there will be between those cards for the physx.

[candle_86]

shouldn't be much, physics are simple math ops that can run on shader units. Think of even say the 8500GT's 16shaders running physic's. Thats more powerful than the latest Core2 Quad for physics. As for implementing it via patch it is very plausable, it cant be done to its fullest extent granted on older games, but rewriting the code to tap an extra GPU over the CPU isnt hard, its a few lines of command.