ATI, graphics products group of Advanced Micro Devices, has plans to demonstrate processing of physics effects on ATI Radeon graphics processing units (GPUs) at the forthcoming Game Developers Conference, an official for the company said late on Thursday. The company also promised to disclose its general GPU physics computing strategy at GDC 2009.

“ATI GPU physics strategy and maybe a demo being thrown down next week at GDC. If you're there, go see it,” said Terry Makedon, general manager of ATI Catalyst driver development, in a blog post.

During one of the sessions at Game Developers Conference AMD's Neal Robison and OTOY's Jules Urbach will explain how improved realism in games does not have to increase development time and effort. Besides, attendees can hear the latest on game computing featuring open, standards-based physics with OpenCL and ATI Stream, and increasing content scalability through server-side rendering powered by AMD's Fusion Render Cloud.

Discrete graphics chips developers ATI Technologies and Nvidia Corp. have been developing video game physics effects computing technologies on graphics chips since 2006. However, since then Intel Corp. has acquired Havok, a game effects specialist, and Nvidia took over Ageia, physics effects specialists. As a result, the so-called GPU physics technologies largely have become proprietary and ATI/AMD had to rely on open-standard OpenCL and DirectX 11’s compute shaders. Nevertheless, it seems that ATI/AMD has still been working on a yet another proprietary physics processing engines on the GPU.

It is unclear whether any video game developer has adopted AMD’s proprietary physics effects engine for video games.

Tags: ATI, AMD, Radeon