The key to NVIDIA’s success with physics acceleration seems to be the the new G80 architecture. According to information that has appeared in NVIDIA document the last couple of days NVIDIA has used a technology similar to that of PureVideo for video acceleration. It has put a layer on the graphics circuit that has been developed for handling physical effects and the calculation power is gathered from G80’s shader processors. Quantum Effects Technology is the name of the new technology and will simply be NVIDIA’s answer to ATI Boundless Gaming but especially AGEIA’s PhysX processor.
Exactly how it works or has been developed remains to be unveiled but what is pretty clear is that you will not need an SLI system to use Quantum Effects Technology. Would you have access to two cards it would definitely result in a mighty performance boost, which Havok has already confirmed.
We should remind you about the statement a presenter made at the CEDEC event in Japan during a demonstration of the new Havok 4 engine. The presenter claimed that the test was run on NVIDIA’s latest graphics circuit and the question is if it could’ve been G80 with its Quantum technology. Anyhow, it seems NVIDIA has some nice trumps with its integrated Quantum technology as it seems to be an efficient implementation of physics into a graphics circuit and could very well become a real threat to AGEIA and PhysX.
