It takes a little more than a GFX card to model physics of a real world.  Research companies use over 4000 supercomputer processors just to model a few seconds of water, and that takes 3 weeks of processing.

I expect the approach taken in Half life 2 would be more appropriate.  Where things like that are scripted rather than modelled.

However it can certainly help the performance of games and allow a better more realistic looking world.

I heard a while back about GFX cards having a seperate processor on them designed specifically for enhanced (performance/quality) physics engines.  What happened to that idea?  ???

Yes, but FS wouln't use that. Those are $1,000+ cards. Most people want to spend $1K on a computer, not on a GPU alone.

Cheers
Cameron

Very interessting,....guess something to look into.

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Or real like aircraft spins, stalls and departures, woow that would be super fly. Really interessting topic there...

Yes but don't you see, you have this card "plus" your normal GFX card. Meaning that this card deals with the complex physics while your GFX card deals with all the eye-candy making it a far smoother and realistic experience.

Watching some of the videos looks like it could be quite promising.

These physic engines are build to simulate hard/softbody dynamics,fracture systems, ragdolls, fluids and stuff like that.
I don´t see to much fields where this could be used in Flighsim... for landings and flight behaviour a much simpler software engine is more than enough. And seriously... having thousands of raindrops
floating over your plane with fluid dynamics.. is still something for a super computer... and can be faked
with much less ressource.

@sterk.. with pixel/vertex shader you also can programm physical behaviour directly into the GFX Card

I know.. usually the word "shader" just defines the behaviour of a surface relative to a light source. But the definition
Pixel/Vertex Shader goes much further.. For example they use pixelshader to simulate 2d warp effects on a screen or bending Surfaces.. etc.
Im general you probabely could code anything with vertex/pixel shader. Also physical behaviour.
Of course the GPU is not optimzed for such operations
like a PPU would be.. but it works !!
check this PDF...
this is the description of a demo that uses the Shader Model 3
to simulate clothes (softbody dynamics)
http://download.developer.nvidia.com/developer/SDK/Individual_Samples/DEMOS/Dire...

Here a short quote from the PDF

""
What Is This? The sample demonstrates how to use Shader Model 3.0 to simulate and render cloth on the GPU. The cloth vertex positions are computed through several pixel shaders and saved into a texture. A vertex shader then reads these positions using Vertex Texture Fetch (VTF) to render the cloth. More information can be found in Cloth.pdf
""

Just today I came across an interesting article.. Actually
it´s german..
http://www.pcgames.de/?article_id=458500

It says that Nvidia will add PPu´s directly to their
Graphic Cards in the future... I think this is a great idea.
I don´t want to be forced to install another Card just to run a certain game.

cheers

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