Xbox 360 Graphics card can do physics on its own

[OrangeSoul]

this:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display...1005202331.html

Raja Kodouri, a senior architect at ATI Technologies told X-bit labs that the company’s graphics processors, including the RADEON 9700, which is the world’s first DirectX 9.0 graphics processing unit (GPU), are capable of processing arrays of vertexes, similar type of operation that AGEIA’s physics processing units (PPUs) can perform. The arrays of data should be processed using pixel shader processors within a chip, the architect said.

Current generation of graphics processors has 16 pixel pipelines, which may not be that many. Nevertheless, in future graphics chips will have more pipes, which will also be unified to process both pixel and vertex shaders. For instance, the Xenos graphics chip used in the Xbox 360 game console from Microsoft has an array of 48 arithmetic logic units (ALUs).

Goes with this:

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/xenos/index.php?p=10

With the capability to fetch from anywhere in memory, perform arbitrary ALU operations and write the results back to memory, in conjunction with the raw floating point performance of the large shader ALU array, the MEMEXPORT facility does have the capability to achieve a wide range of fairly complex and general purpose operations; basically any operation that can be mapped to a wide SIMD array can be fairly efficiently achieved and in comparison to previous graphics pipelines it is achieved in fewer cycles and with lower latencies. For instance, this is probably the first time that general purpose physics calculation would be achievable, with a reasonable degree of success, on a graphics processor and is a big step towards the graphics processor becoming much more like a vector co-processor to the CPU.

Note: Memexport is not in ATI X1800 XT because its supposedly is only supported by Direct X 10 (in PC Cards) so Memexport is part of DX9.5 which XBox 360 API has.