The demo, presented at NVIDIA’s event yesterday where they announced the new GTX 1080 Ti, covers a large area brimming with opportunity for physics-based interactions, a field of seemingly infinite boulders and a bulldozer created to show off the sort of scale that GPUs can drive interactions for rigid body simulation.
The new GPU rigid body physics comes as part of a new version of the company’s PhysX system, 3.4, which is part of the GameWorks package of rendering and simulation technologies which is now launching with DX12 support.
Previous GPU rigid body solutions had some trade-offs that NVIDIA says you won’t have to make with the demo, which no longer sacrifice PhysX features like joints.
NVIDIA also maintains the CPU-based algorithm and GPU-based algorithm “fundamentally match,” so you can switch between CPU and GPU depending upon the workload.
The company says they’ll be releasing the bulldozer demo to the public.
Disclosure: Along with other press, NVIDIA covered accommodation expenses for Road to VR to attend an event where information for this article was gathered.