Game Makers Don't Care About Hardware-Accelerated Physics

There has been much talk surrounding physics effects in games, and while it is generally accepted that such a feature adds to quality and enjoyment, it looks like it is not as vital as some might think.

As some end-users might know, Advanced Micro Devices is no longer bereft of a Physics engine (NVIDIA used to have a monopoly on this, more or less).

The fact that PhysX is an NVIDIA owned standard has kept the number of game developers bent on adding physics effects to their games lower than it might otherwise have been.

Apparently, AMD doesn't think that many game makers will adopt hardware-accelerated physics, at least not as far as titles scheduled to debut this year ago, even with an open source solution available.

This is because developers are more inclined to use their own implementations, not to mention how software makers in general don't see GPU-accelerated physics as a priority.

"I don't think there will be a large number of [games with OpenCL GPU hardware-accelerated physics] this year. Hardware-based physics does not seem to be a huge priority for software developers,” said Neal Robison, senior director of content and application support at AMD, in an interview with X-bit labs.

“We want to make it available as we have that technology, but it seems like a lot of developers are still choosing to use their own physics implementations simply because they [...] are just really concerned about making sure that the experience the consumer has is consistent no matter what graphics card they have in their system or whether they have a very powerful discrete GPU or not. The technology is there some developers will take advantage of it."

Those game developers that will use hardware physics in their games will have to choose between NVIDIA's technology and the open source Bullet Physics.

For those that don't know, the latter is based on OpenCL and works on both AMD and NVIDIA cards.