AMD's answer to NVIDIA's PhysX spreads its wings.
Ever since AMD bought out ATI's graphic technology, they've worked the cards hard and squeezed out as much performance as they can - even making dual-GPU cards popular.
One thing they haven't been able to do until now is add physics processing support to their cards - something that their competitor NVIDIA managed to do by purchasing Ageia back in February 2008.
The only remaining physics engine that is anywhere near ready to use was Havok (used to critical acclaim in Half Life 2), and this was ironically purchased by AMD's CPU competitor, Intel, in 2007.
Still, it's a more attractive choice than paying exorbitant amounts of money to NVIDIA for a PhysX license, and using a mix of OpenCL and ATI Stream the physics calculations of the Havok engine will be able to be performed on the GPU, giving performance increases beyond that of a typical CPU.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012