The idea is that specialized processors offload time-consuming tasks from a computer's CPU, much like how a GPU performs graphics operations in the main CPU's place. The term was coined by Ageia's marketing to describe their PhysX chip to consumers. Several other technologies in the CPU-GPU spectrum have some features in common with it, although Ageia's solution was the only complete one designed, marketed, supported, and placed within a system exclusively as a PPU. General-purpose computing on graphics processing unit (GPGPU) Hardware acceleration for physics processing is now usually provided by graphics processing units that support more general computation, a concept known as general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). AMD and NVIDIA provide support for rigid body dynamics computations on their latest graphics cards. NVIDIA's GeForce 8 Series supports a GPU-based Newtonian physics acceleration technology named Quantum Effects Technology. NVIDIA provides an SDK Toolkit for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology that offers both a low and high-level API to the GPU. For their GPUs, AMD offers a similar SDK, called Close to Metal (CTM), which provides a thin hardware interface. PhysX is an example of a physics engine that can use GPGPU based hardware acceleration when it is available. Engines Real-time physics engines Open source Advanced Simulation Library - open source hardware accelerated multiphysics simulation software Box2D Bullet Chipmunk physics engine - 2D physics engine Newton Game Dynamics Open Dynamics Engine PAL (Physics Abstraction Layer) - A uniform API that supports multiple physics engines PhysX Project Chrono - An open source simulation engine for multi-physics applications. Siconos Modeling and the simulation of mechanical systems with contact, impact and Coulomb's friction SOFA (Simulation Open Framework Architecture) Tokamak physics engine Public domain Phyz (Dax Phyz) - 2.5D physics simulator/editor. Closed source/limited free distribution Digital Molecular Matter Havok Chaos by Epic Games Vortex by CMLabs Simulations AGX Multiphysics by Algoryx Simulation AB Algodoo by Algoryx Simulation AB Rubikon by Valve Corporation High precision physics engines VisSim - Visual Simulation engine for linear and nonlinear dynamics See also Game physics Ragdoll physics Procedural animation Rigid body dynamics Soft body dynamics Physics processing unit Cell microprocessor Linear complementarity problem Impulse/constraint physics engines require a solver for such problems to handle multi-point collisions. Finite Element Analysis References Further reading Bourg, David M. (2002) Physics for Game Developers. O'Reilly & Associates. External links Computer graphics Video game development Articles containing video clips