This is why Intel bought the Havok physics engine. AMD kills the GPU physics implementation. Makes total sense from Intel's point of view, last thing they want is for more processing to be moved off of their widget. This will probably also effect the PhysiX Accelerator card as well. Now the only hope for accelerated physics on the GPU is going to be Microsoft's APIs for physics acceleration.

Personally I think that this sucks. I mean I didn't have much hope for physics acceleration as being the next great thing with regard to video simulations but I do think that killing a project just because they don't have a good competing product is a bad thing. Both Nvidia and AMD/ATI are trying to increase the amount of usable computer power while Intel is just trying to maintain their competitive advantage.

I want to see more and more processing moved to a GPU or other external CPU when it makes sense, but developers will not do so unless there are libraries that abstract this complexity out for them. Software should be able to dynamically respond to the hardware it is being run on to achieve maximum performance when desired. That's why DirectX has been so successful, cause even when things are not supported natively, many computers can still use software emulation to achieve the same effect (at reduced performance sometimes).

Basically I want the ability to easily throw more hardware at a problem and have it work.

What Sun needs to do with Java (as a platform).

• Stop including every little pet feature as part of the standard platform. Create a better extension mechanism and use that instead.
  
• Make the initial download smaller.
• Make it trivial for users of the JRE to get dependencies in software.
• Start a network library repository that stores different versions of java libraries for download by jre clients. It should be trivial for end users to get any software in this repository so that any sanctioned software.
  
• Embrace SWT and other competing technologies. They should stop hampering other technologies just because they prefer their internal technologies.
• Make the VM a place where any code from any language can run, which is a move twords the CLR of the .NET platform but a good one. The JVM is a good place to run lots of code and by being language agnostic the platform is only enhanced.