Nvidia's Future Isn't Graphics?

What's the future of graphics? Well, to hear Nvidia tell it, it's almost anything but.

In a presentation Friday, Nvidia recapped all of its twelve hours or so of presentations made at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC 2009), covering the technologies that the company is working towards with its graphics chips and related technologies. If there was a trend that Nvidia emphasized at the show, it's that the company hopes that graphics is moving away from individually created objects and art to more of a procedural model, where the GPU acts as sort of a location director, creating vegetation, directing AI actors, and and costuming characters in dynamic materials.

The foundation for this, of course, is two initiatives; its programming language, CUDA, which governs the use of the GPU as a general-purpose computing engine, and PhysX, its Ageia-born technology of using the GPU as a physics engine.

Over 150 games across both the PC and game console platforms use PhysX; far fewer, however, use the GPU-powered PhysX version. Those include a new game from a Russian developer, "Cryostasis," which includes particle effects; GRAW 2, which includes destructible objects and kinetic damage from those objects; "Star Tales," a Chinese game combining Sim-like aspects, which models falling objects; and "Sacred 2," which launches next week and uses physics-based spell effects.

But Nvidia's next initiative may also be its most vague: artificial intelligence, or AI. "Doing AI is a totally feasible goal," Tony Tamasi, the senior vide president for content and middleware, said in a small press conference on Friday. "For the next few months, we'll be working with third-party middleware guys to develop this" for Nvidia's hardware, he said.

For whatever reason, AI seems to be the natural extension of physics developers; rival Havok, which uses the CPU as a processing engine, unveiled its latest toolset with support for AI. But AISeek, a dedicated AI choip company which was founded in 2005, is essentially on life support, Tamasi said. (A Google cache of AISeek.com reported a dispute between the company and its hosting provider, which had taken down the page and replace it with its own as of March 22. At press time, AISeek.com was live with its own content.)

Nvidia also launched APEX (Adaptive Physics Extensions) this week, a method for generating physical interactions. The company unveiled several plug-ins, including procedural models for rendering clothing, hair, the destruction of walls and other surfaces, and turbulence, such as in smoke or water. The destruction model either could be used to destroy the entire geometry of walls and other objects (a concept first introduced in the PC game, "Red Faction") or could be used to "slough off" rubble from walls or ceilings, which would remain as persistent objects in the game world.