I've recently started a project, building a physics engine. I was hoping you could give me some advice related to some documentation and/or best technologies for this.
First of all, I've seen that Game-Physics-Engine-Development is highly recommended for the task at hand, and I was wondering if you could give me a second opinion.Should I get it? Also, while browsing Amazon, I've stumbled onto Game Engine Architecture and since I want to build my physics engine for games, I thought this might be a good read aswell.
Second, I know that simulating physics is highly computation intensive so I would like to use either CUDA or OpenCL.Right now I'm leaning towards OpenCL, because it would work on both NVIDIA and ATI chipsets.What do you guys suggest?
PS: I will be implementing this in C++ on Linux.
Thanks.
Here is an answer regarding the choice of CUDA or OpenCL. I do not have a recommendation for a book.
If you want to run your program on both NVIDIA and ATI chipsets, then OpenCL will make the job easier. However, you will want to write a different version of each kernel to get good performance on each chipset. For example, on ATI cards you'll want to manually vectorize code using float4/int4 data types (or accept a nearly 4x performance penalty), while NVIDIA works better with scalar data types.
If you're only targeting NVIDIA, then CUDA is somewhat more convenient to program in.