Wouldn’t it be great if developers had an additional, cost-free way of integrating realistic material physics into their games? AMD has answered that call with its newly published FEM-based (Finite Element Method) FEMFX library, which leverages the power of multithreaded CPUs for creating visual effects and physics interactions. It’s part of red team’s GPUOpen initiative (“no cost and open development tools and software”).
FEMFX is a multithreaded CPU library for deformable material physics, using the Finite Element Method (FEM). Solid objects are represented as a mesh of tetrahedral elements, and each element has material parameters that control stiffness, how volume changes with deformation, and stress limits where fracture or plastic (permanent) deformation occur. The model supports a wide range of materials and interactions between materials.