does anybody knows something about it?

it was installed here, but not by me, maybe a game or something

i have no idea

i googled it , and it was a gpu accelerator, or something like that

doesnt makes sense

i know, but i dont get how this thing was installed from nowhere

Have you installed any games that could require a physics engine? If so, it would be likely that it was installed during the installation of the game.

whats a physic engine?

i installed bioshock, medal of honor airbone demo and fifa 2008 demo recently

thats what im thinking too, it wasnt there before them

A physics engine is just a layer that takes care of the physics for the game developer, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel. Take the soccer game for example. Without a physics engine, each time the ball is kicked, they have to determine exactly how high it goes and what its trajectory is based on the angle and force of the kick, as well as any wind resistance and speed, and they have to translate its position into an actual location on the screen. I haven't used a physics engine before, but I'd imagine having something like that saves a ton of time and effort and makes it more reliable.

It's kinda like how they have graphics engines like OpenGL, DirectX, etc. Instead of programmatically figuring out exactly which pixels need to change for which shape, they can just do things like glFillOval() or glSetColor().

Wait, I'm a bit confused. Wouldn't you need to get a physics card first?

that's what i thought, but it's been a long time since i went shopping for a high end system or even reading extreme tech. are they building this into the new graphic boards? are we looking at more software overhead instead of hardware? what good is it if it's software? won't that just eat up more of your gpu or cpu if its using that?

inquiring minds want to know and are too lazy to google it.

It won't eat up anymore software. It's just using pre-written code instead of doing it from scratch. Maybe they're building it into the hardware, I don't know, but it's either way, it's just an abstraction. It's an API so you can simply invoke certain methods in your code and not have to worry about how it actually works.

i meant ram or gpu/cpu cycles if it wasn't running on hardware, but i didn't use the right language. i need more food. maybe they're building it in. i just found it curious it was installed on sir bain's system as code when he doesn't have the hardware.

maybe it's there in case? i wonder if it's actively running or just on his system

i'm going to pick up bioshock. the question is xbox 360 or PC.

What hardware doesn't he have? It sounds like it's just a software package that makes game developers able to avoid having to write the code themselves.

There WAS a physics board on high end gaming systems to take advantage of the code. It might be that a chip is now included on video boards rather than a separate accelerator board. I was all over this when ordering the Velocity system for my daughter. I decided against the board since it took a slot and was several hundred $ but that was last year. you know how fast things change.

Yeah, I've seen physics cards advertised before and I remember hearing about Ageia PhysX at some point. The thing is that I've only heard of the product as being hardware. I don't really know about it so I'm not certain but I guess when the card is not present the calculations are just performed by the gpu instead. The physics card would just free up the gpu from performing the task.

that's what i think. i could pull the super video cooling system for the card but that sounds crazy, doesn't it? NOOOOO