AMD's activity related to the implementation of physics in games seems to be a battle fought on two fronts. On the one hand, the company is saying NVIDIA uses bribery to promote its PhysX. On the other hand, it has decided to provide added support to open source physics platforms, in collaboration with Pixelux Entertainment and Bullet Physics. The Sunnyvale, California-based CPU and GPU maker has announced access to the Pixelus Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), along with its sponsorship of free DMM2 for the PC platform. In addition, Bullet Physics will be used as the default rigid body physics system with Pixelux’s DMM2 material physics engine.

Through these actions, Advanced Micro Devices allows game developers to integrate physics simulation in titles based on both OpenCL and DirectCompute-capable platforms. Not only that, but the Free PC version of the DMM2 has no DMM license fee while still including all the features of the premium version, including GPU acceleration.

“Establishing an open and affordable physics development environment is an important accomplishment for both game developers and gamers, signaling a move away from exclusionary or proprietary approaches,” said Eric Demers, chief technology officer, AMD Graphics Division. “Not only does the integration of Bullet Physics into partner middleware helps drive broader adoption of physics in games, it ensures that when those games are released, all gamers, regardless of the hardware in their PC, can benefit from the more realistic experience enabled by those effects.”

“With today’s announcement, the incredible physical simulation effects seen in the latest games and blockbuster films can be used by all developers – a tremendous milestone for the industry,” stated Mitchell Bunnell, chief executive officer, Pixelux. “Working closely with AMD and Bullet’s main author, Erwin Coumans, we’ve enabled tight integration of our DMM2 system and Bullet Physics, giving developers a sophisticated, yet easy-to-use physics pipeline they can use to create things that have never been seen before.”

The Free PC DMM2 should become available soon for interested developers and AMD is also offering new parallel GPU accelerated implementations of Bullet Physics' Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) Fluids and Soft Bodies/Cloth. The new code will be written in OpenCL and Direct Computer and will be available as open source.