AMD Says Language Behind Folding@Home Usable for Game Physics

Nemo - April 30, 2008 06:17PM in Video Cards

It looks as if all the work AMD/ATI provided in support of the development of the GPU Folding@Home client can be used in other ways. Brook for GPUs is a highly parallel language developed by Stanford for use on stream processors and is the driving force behind the GPU Folding@Home client. Currently it is only supported on ATI graphics cards, but professor Vijay Pande, director of Stanford's highly successful Folding@Home project, said it could be extended to NVIDIA cards as well. AMD has taken the open source language and developed an extended version called Brook Plus for use in handling gaming physics. As Brook Plus is still hardware independent, it could be used by other manufacturers as well. With NVIDIA having bought PhysX and Havok now owned by Intel, AMD has been looking at alternative ways of handling gaming physics on a GPU.