The GPU Technology Conference: NVIDIA's New Focus in a Changing Market

OpenCL and Physics; A Market Cornered

With Windows 7 just about to ship to consumers worldwide, many of us will soon be talking about the possibilities OpenCL (Open Compute Language) brings to the table. In the most simplified terms, OpenCL is an open source API which allows developers to take harness the power of modern GPUs in order to accelerate certain tasks. It isn’t limited to Microsoft operating systems either since Apple has also made OpenCL an integral part of their news OSX Snow Leopard platform.


The true goal of OpenCL is to allow for workloads to be spread across heterogeneous platforms which consist of GPUs and CPUs (along with other processors) and prioritize the workflow towards the hardware which is best able to handle the processing. As such, serial and task workloads with be sent to the CPU while larger data parallel workloads will be the graphics cards’ domain. The developers we spoke to are extremely excited about OpenCL but many admitted that it may take them a while to come to grips with directing tasks to the necessary hardware within a heterogeneous environment. These same developers also made it apparent that no matter what the challenges may be with OpenCL, they would rather support open standards rather than closed ones. As for NVIDIA, OpenCL is a programming language which is supported within the CUDA architecture.


OpenCL may at first sound like it will have very little to do with the way games are presented but that couldn’t be further from the truth. It will play a huge part in allowing GPUs to process many of the most demanding physics calculations while allowing the CPU to continue on with other tasks. NVIDIA is actually leading the field here with publicly available OpenCL drivers, support through the CUDA architecture as well as SDK implementation.

When it comes to the public’s opinion, NVIDIA’s take on physics processing has taken some black eyes as of late with its PhysX API being relegated to the back rooms of the development community. Even though the list of PC games with support is minimal, there have been some notable exceptions with the release of Batman: Arkum Asylum foremost among them.

However, the real story here is not about a proprietary API like PhysX but rather what OpenCL can bring to NVIDIA’s table when it comes to supporting physics calculations. NVIDIA is now in an enviable position since with their firm support behind OpenCL, they are now able to boast compatibility for every GPU-accelerated physics API on the market. Bullet, Havok Cloth, the DMM Engine and many others will soon be seeing their debut across multiple platforms which include ATI AND NVIDIA GPUs. However, with their additional support for PhysX, NVIDIA GPUs seem to have a leg up on the competition when consumers are looking for a product which supports as many applications as possible. Sure, OpenCL could further marginalize PhysX but if it is does, NVIDIA is still in a prime position to support any and all OpenCL physics APIs.