Gaming has come a long way graphics-wise but there’s still quite a ways to go when it comes to the details that would make them truly immersive. One of those somewhat under-represented features is physics modeling which would improve realism but has so far been splintered into camps.

AMD has joined up with Pixelux Entertainment in order to develop an open source alternative physics engine that should be able to run on any OpenCL or DirectX 11 DirectCompute capable graphics card or hardware.

Interesting approach but, then again, there are only so many graphics chip makers and Intel, with Havok, and Nvidia, with PhysX, have already staked their claim.

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Nvidia has released their latest ForceWare driver sets for Microsoft Windows operating systems. The new drivers sport several improvements and bug fixes that should be especially interesting to OpenGL and Windows 7 users. Here’s a peek at some of the changes:

• Adds support for OpenGL 3.1
• Adds support for CUDA 2.3 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications. See CUDA Zone for more details.
• Includes several new control panel features and numerous bug fixes. More information can be found in the release documentation.

Here are the links to Nvidia’s download site for Windows XP:

Nvidia GeForce / ION ForceWare 190.62 Drivers for Windows XP
Nvidia GeForce / ION ForceWare 190.62 Drivers for Windows XP 64-bit

As for Windows 7 users you’ll be happy to note that the drivers:

• Adds WHQL support on Windows 7 for Microsoft’s new DirectX GPU Computing API: DirectCompute.

Which should speed up video encoding tasks and any other applications that use the feature in the future.

Here are the links to Nvidia’s download site for Windows Vista and Windows 7 drivers:

Nvidia GeForce / ION ForceWare 190.62 Windows 7 and Windows Vista
Nvidia GeForce / ION ForceWare 190.62 Windows 7 and Windows Vista 64-bit