NVIDIA CUDA Emulator for every PC
NVIDIA's CUDA GPU compute API could be making its way to practically every PC, with an NVIDIA GPU in place, or not. A chinese freelance developer has coded a means to get CUDA work as a middleware on OpenCL. This move lets CUDA work on ATI Radeon GPUs that support OpenCL, as well as x86 CPUs, since OpenCL specs allow the API to run on CPUs for development purposes. The implications of these are many:
Letting CUDA-accelerated software such as Badaboom make use of ATI GPUs
Letting PhysX run on ATI GPUs as PhysX middleware uses CUDA for GPU acceleration
Possibly better scaling of PhysX on multi-core CPUs (over OpenCL), as the regular PhysX CPU acceleration is infamous for bad multi-core scaling in performance
The software works as a translation layer, exchanging calls between CUDA and OpenCL or the CPU if OpenCL is not available. It comes in the form of a loader application that injects itself into the executing process. To get PhysX to run, one needs to install older versions of PhysX System Software (version 8.09.04 WHQL being the latest) from its standalone installer (installs PhysX libraries without looking for NVIDIA GPUs).
NVIDIA CUDA Emulator for every PC
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