Physics processing unit to demo at E3

MIGHTY TIM Sweeney, the developer of the Unreal 3 engine, said that his company is ready to embrace physics processing unit marchitecture and that it has been using NovodeX physics API for a long time now. It is using it in a new Unreal 3 engine that is still under development. We saw some demos of the Unreal 3 engine back in April 2004 when Nvidia launched NV40 and it looked astonishing.

Tim said that the next generation Unreal engine powered with next generation graphic, richer content needs better physics as well. You will be able to experience this in early 2006, once Tim finishes Unreal 3 engine and once when games based on this engine gets released. They will however be able to use a hardware Physics Processing Unit (PPU).

The PPU is definitely the next step in making games look good and senior Intel executives have told us that its firm likes the fact that there will be a dedicated piece of hardware that will accelerate physics calculations in games.

We saw some software demos personally, and it looked cool enough to impress us. AEGIA, the company behind this hardware, is going to show it publicly together with few games at the upcoming Los Angeles based E3 gaming show.

This will be the first time we'll see games using it and technology demos using the real hardware and this is an exciting prospect. µ