Patent ID: 7739479

Claim:
A method of incorporating physics simulation data into a game running on a game system comprising a host and a Physics Processing Unit (PPU) coupled to the host, wherein the host comprises a Central Processing Unit (CPU) and a host memory, the method comprising: running a main game program on the host; calling a PPU driver from the main game program; initiating operation of the PPU, via an application programming interface (API) associated with the PPU driver, for computing physics simulation data; transmitting commands for computing the physics simulation data via the PPU driver to a PPU control engine (PCE) within the PPU, wherein the PCE controls the overall operation of the PPU by allocating memory resources and distributing the commands to a Floating Point Engine (FPE) for processing within a vector processor included in the FPE and adapted to perform multiple, parallel floating point operations to generate the physics simulation data, and wherein the multiple, parallel floating point operations are specified by a very long instruction word (VLIW) that is issued to the FPE by the PCE; transmitting physics data from the host memory to the PPU via the PPU driver; computing the physics simulation data by calling microcode routines on the physics data; and receiving the physics simulation data from the PPU and storing the physics simulation data in the host memory via the PPU driver.