HD4850 accelerated physics?

there was some talk of porting CUDA, and with it PhysX, over to ati hardware. The website was NGOHQ.com, I'm not sure how much progress they have made.
 
TG Daily: What are AMD's thoughts about GPU-accelerated physics?

Cheng: There is a time and place for everything, including GPU-accelerated physics simulation. The model that AMD is pursuing is a balanced platform approach and offloading to the GPU where it makes sense. There are a few factors that we considered when we formed this strategy:

The primary technical challenge today for video games is rendering. Rendering will remain the limitation for realism and gameplay for the foreseeable future. It would be better to focus the GPUs on rendering to provide the best game play. Also remember that when you create more objects or rigid bodies with physics simulation, it further taxes the rendering system. There are scenarios where GPU physics simulation actually slows down gameplay and decreases the experience.

With the proliferation of quad-core CPUs from AMD and Intel, there is ample horsepower to run physics simulation on the CPU. Most games today can take advantage of two cores effectively, scaling to the third and fourth core yields diminishing performance. The game developers are realizing that there is available horsepower with the third and fourth cores for physics simulation.

Game developers will write code for the biggest installed base of hardware to ensure a big market for their games. The only certainty for the developers is that there will be a multi-core CPU in modern PCs. To write a game that supports a proprietary GPU-based physics API would mean a vastly different code base for the game developer as well as relegating this type of game experience to a small percentage of the computers. Clearly, this is not the desirable path for game developers and AMD.

Our strategy is to optimize our CPUs to run Havok’s API and libraries and then to investigate how we can improve gameplay with offloading certain forms of physics simulation to the GPU. We have our theories and models, but we will not announce our product plans until we are ready to roll them out.
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http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/38392/118/
 
So it sort of does but not really? I read on manufacture sites for this that it has "accelerated physics."

By the looks, you'd basically need an AMD CPU... Aye.. Q9450 quadcore will probably be able to put up a good fight none the less. :\
 
You could always get a cheap PhysX PPU. The price should be coming down on these anyway since nvidia cards can emulate PhysX via cuda. 4850 + PPU works great.
 
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