GDC 2016: PhysX GPU Rigid Body and NVIDIA Flow

Spets · Mar 17, 2016

At Game Developer Conference 2016 (GDC), NVIDIA has announced the GameWorks 3.1 development kit, which introduces several new physics simulation solutions – PhysX GRB and NVIDIA Flow. Let’s take a look at them more closely:

PhysX GRB

PhysX GRB is the new GPU accelerated Rigid Body simulation pipeline. It is based on heavily modified branch of PhysX SDK 3.4, but has all the features of the standard SDK and almost identical API. PhysX GRB is currently utilizing CUDA and requires NVIDIA card for GPU acceleration.

Unlike previous implementations, PhysX GRB is featuring hybrid CPU/GPU rigid body solver, and the simulation can be executed either on CPU or GPU with almost no difference in behavior, supported object types or features (GPU articulations are not implemented yet, however).

GRB provides GPU accelerated broad phase, contact generation, constraint solver and body/shape management. In addition, it introduces new implementations of island management and pair management that have been optimized to tolerate the order of magnitude more complex scenes that can be simulated on GPU compared to CPU. New mechanisms to parallelize event notification callbacks and a new feature to lazily update scene query asynchronously are also provided.

GPU acceleration can be enabled on a per-scene basis by setting specific flags on the scene and theoretically, any application that uses the PhysX 3.4 SDK or later can choose to run some or all of its rigid body simulation on an NVIDIA GPU with no additional programming effort.

GPU rigid body simulation takes advantage of the massive parallelism afforded by modern GPUs and can provide speed-ups in the region of 4x-6x faster and above compared to CPU simulation in the scenes with large amount of objects.

However, when simulating smaller scenes (commonly less than 500-1000 bodies depending on the hardware involved), simulating on the GPU tends to be slightly slower than simulating on the CPU, because there is a fixed cost associated with simulating a scene on the GPU. This cost is related to the overhead of DMAing input data to the GPU, dispatching the kernels required for GPU simulation, DMAing back the results and synchronizing with the GPU.

For performance comparisons, graphs and more information visit: http://physxinfo.com/news/12649/gdc-2016-physx-gpu-rigid-body-and-nvidia-flow/

PhysX GRB SDK and demo should be released to public in the following weeks.

NVIDIA Flow

NVIDIA Flow is the new computational fluid dynamics algorithm that simulates combustible fluids such as fire and smoke.

Flow is featuring a dynamic grid-based simulation and volume rendering. It also includes a hardware agnostic DX11/DX12 implementation.
Click to expand...

http://physxinfo.com/news/12649/gdc-2016-physx-gpu-rigid-body-and-nvidia-flow/

Spets · Mar 17, 2016

PcPer's demo compilation of the demos from GDC:

Spets · Mar 17, 2016

Short clip on Turf Effects

cudarenderer · Mar 17, 2016

NVIDIA Turf Effects - Availability: Early 2015!???? Still no download?! NV is confused...

applejack · Mar 18, 2016

FLEX 1.0.0 released today as well. demo package download:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/8lcqw3y1o41de9k/FLEX-1.0.0.7z

now waiting for these GRB and FLOW demos to release...

Spets · Mar 19, 2016

applejack said: ↑

FLEX 1.0.0 released today as well. demo package download:

http://www.mediafire.com/download/8lcqw3y1o41de9k/FLEX-1.0.0.7z

now waiting for these GRB and FLOW demos to release...
Click to expand...

According to Zogrim from PhysXinfo.com we may see them in a few weeks.

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