It was used to design ballistics tables to help the United States military estimate where artillery shells of various mass would land when fired at varying angles and gunpowder charges, also accounting for drift caused by wind.
Physics engines have been commonly used on supercomputers since the 1980s to perform computational fluid dynamics modeling, where particles are assigned force vectors that are combined to show circulation.
One of these meshes is the highly complex and detailed shape visible to the player in the game, such as a vase with elegant curved and looping handles.
Another aspect of precision in discrete collision detection involves the framerate, or the number of moments in time per second when physics is calculated.
The tessellation results in a number of finite elements which represent aspects of the object's physical properties such as toughness, plasticity, and volume preservation.
The visual representation of the 3D object is altered by the finite element system through the use of a deformation shader run on the CPU or GPU.
With higher performance processors and tools to rapidly create the volumetric tessellations, real-time finite element systems began to be used in games, beginning with Star Wars: The Force Unleashed that used Digital Molecular Matter for the deformation and destruction effects of wood, steel, flesh and plants using an algorithm developed by Dr. James O'Brien as a part of his PhD thesis.
For a game physics engine, such constant active precision is unnecessarily wasting the limited CPU power, which can cause problems such as decreased framerate.
Modern physics engines may also contain fluid simulations, animation control systems and asset integration tools.
Collision detection computed at a too low frequency can result in objects passing through each other and then being repelled with an abnormal correction force.
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.
AMD and NVIDIA provide support for rigid body dynamics computations on their latest graphics cards.
NVIDIA provides an SDK Toolkit for CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) technology that offers both a low and high-level API to the GPU.
[5] For their GPUs, AMD offers a similar SDK, called Close to Metal (CTM), which provides a thin hardware interface.