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Rumour control: GPU physics in Unreal Tournament III
GPU physics could be achieved on a single graphics card, and would make a big difference to benchmarks
Even though talks between Havok and ATI have broken down since Intel bought the company, GPU physics were in development for quite some time before that, and it looks as though Unreal Tournament III could even support GPU physics with a future update.
An anonymous source who works in game development told Custom PC that ‘the most interesting stuff we’ve done recently is with a "triple A" game, that’s shipping now actually, which is physics-accelerated on GPUs, and in fact in the engine that the game is built upon.’
So which ‘triple A’ game would this be? ‘I’m not allowed to name things at the moment,’ said our source, ‘which is why I’m being a little bit evasive, but both the engine and the game benefit from GPU acceleration in physics for the eye candy stuff, and it has a very significant benefit in benchmarks, but the developer hasn’t yet made a public statement about that.’ However, they did say that you could buy the game now.
How many games can you think of that have recently been released, support hardware physics and feature a new game engine? We asked if it was Unreal Tournament III, and our cryptic source told us that ‘that’s a fairly well educated guess, but I’m not telling you that you’ve got it right yet. I’m not allowed to substantiate or refute your guess, because if I refute it you can go through the list of games and eventually you’ll isolate it, and if I confirm it then I’m obviously in trouble!’
It’s fair enough, really; we can see why they wouldn’t want to announce something that wasn’t official. However, it certainly looks to us like there may be a patch on the way to enable GPU physics in Unreal Tournament III. Not only that, but you wouldn’t need multiple graphics cards for it either.
‘The coding [in the game] has used the Cal and CPM interfaces,’ our source told us, ‘so it just talks to the driver and does its physics computation on the GPU; it simply lines it up and knows that on a particular piece of hardware this is a sensible balance to go for. So you can run it on a single GPU or you can run it on multiple GPUs.’
Ageia has already released some extras for Unreal Tournament III for owners of its PhysX hardware, but this is the first we’ve heard of GPU physics being used in the game, if indeed this is the game in question.
