Cinema Physics

[CrazyMrB]

Could the PPU be used in non-gaming faculties? I mean, if I decided to render a few shots in 3ds and have some collisions with outrageous explosions (just for fun and learning, since it is educational software), would the PPU speed up my render times and simultaneously allowing more freely moving particles?

B

 

[Brent_Justice]

Technically it may be capable of that but it would be up to the application to utilize it.

More realistically your GPU can be easier adapted for that task since the GPU is already there, and the 3D part isn't being used when in applications like that. That is the whole idea behind general purpose computing using the GPU. But again it is up to the application developer to build in that support.

 

[Sly]

Considering the time it takes to render a frame, it doesn't really matter if the CPU takes a few milliseconds longer to render.

I've played around with the havok physics in 3D Studio Max (It's built in since version 5, maybe even before then). Kinda cool what you could do with it, but the physics computations for collisions, waves, etc. are insignificant compared to the rendering time.

The thing that really kills my PC are the splines for making the spine in bone kinematics, dunno if it's physics related or a bug but moving to the previous frame after you connect all the limbs and skins takes as much as 20 seconds!!! It has no problem scrolling through a thousand bouncing objects for particle animation, but practically freezing on a simple spine?!