Editing Physics engine (section)

== General-purpose computing on graphics processing unit (GPGPU) ==
{{Main|General-purpose computing on graphics processing units}}

Hardware acceleration for physics processing is now usually provided by graphics processing units that support more general computation, a concept known as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). [[AMD]] and [[NVIDIA]] provide support for rigid body dynamics computations on their latest graphics cards.

[[NVIDIA|NVIDIA's]] [[GeForce 8 series]] supports a GPU-based Newtonian physics acceleration technology named ''Quantum Effects Technology''. NVIDIA provides an SDK Toolkit for [[CUDA]] ([[Compute Unified Device Architecture]]) technology that offers both a low and high-level API to the GPU.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html |title=NVIDIA 8800 features page - Quantum Effects Technology |publisher=Nvidia.com |access-date=2010-08-16}}</ref> For their GPUs, [[AMD]] offers a similar SDK, called [[Close to Metal]] (CTM), which provides a thin hardware interface.

[[PhysX]] is an example of a physics engine that can use GPGPU based hardware acceleration when it is available.