By John Walker on July 23rd, 2010 at 11:24 am.
Ooh, ooh, it’s Mafia II. That’s the official song. I sing it because there are two more trailers, one of which features an interview with the splendid Director of Creative Production Jack Scalici. He discusses the story, the motivations, and the music. (If you want to read a lot more thoughts from Scalici, be sure to check out my feature on voice direction.) The second is an advert for NVidia. Oh, and don’t forget to check out our recent preview of the game.
Here’s Scalici:
I’ve mentioned this before, but I really cannot understand the logic behind aligning with one hardware manufacturer over another. Mafia II boasts unique special effects and physics if you had only thought to get an NVidia card when you upgraded your GPU six months ago. So, basically, fuck you if you have an ATI. Which I do. Thanks, Mafia II. In this video there’s a lot of stuff about playing the game in 3D. And the APEX gubbins.
23/07/2010 at 11:28 Choca says:
Yeah, they can talk about APEX all day long but it’s not gonna change the fact that almost no one is going to be able to use it. I mean seriously the recommended configuration to run it in high settings is a GeForce GTX 480 for the graphics only and GTX 285 dedicated to PhysX only.
In the preview version I played, turning it on burned away about 50 frames per second. I’d rather kepp my 60 fps thank you.
23/07/2010 at 22:42 PHeMoX says:
It’s why 3D for real-time games will fail. It will cost WAY too much performance, not to mention that everyone wishes their games to look better every year and not worse.
One would have thought they’d learned their lesson from the whole graphics card accelerated physics thing, but nope.
23/07/2010 at 11:40 Pmeie says:
Too late nvidia/mafia II, I am one of the millions who bought top of the line ATI stuff because it was more affordable and better performing than the delayed and overpriced 400 series.
Maybe i just wont buy mafia II until there’s a cheap sale and i have an nvidia card in the future. Which I might never have. Way to have your plan backfire, u evil marketing poops.
23/07/2010 at 11:42 Choca says:
As long as you don’t plan to use APEX, the game (or at least the preview version of it) works fine on ATI cards.
23/07/2010 at 12:12 Lilliput King says:
You might be going a little OTT here. It’ll probably be like Batman:AA where having an Nvidia card made your cape a bit more swooshy. We can live without the a modicum of additional swoosh, surely.
23/07/2010 at 14:43 Xercies says:
No! I am an ATI user and i demand my Swoosh!
23/07/2010 at 15:48 Pmeie says:
Yeah I did overreact a little – the thing I would like most is for the glass to be the same.. so long as I can break glass like that and see it all fall out all fancy like and some still stay stuck in place.. i’ll b happy.. but i dont know if you can do that on ati cos they kept showing glass when talking about nvidia.
24/07/2010 at 09:13 Saiko Kila says:
Actually the most important part of physx effect (and most impressive) in Batman was smoke/fog, not the cape or flying sheets. This should be included in every future RPG. Also scarecrow’s segments had much more diverse and nice graphics with high physics on, but it was also the toughest part for the GPU.
23/07/2010 at 12:22 Nova says:
“Problem” is that nVidia apparently sends developers their own engineers to help optimize for GeForce-cards and integrate special nVidia stuff, for free.
Kind of an offer you can’t refuse.
23/07/2010 at 14:50 Nick says:
those cunning bastards.
23/07/2010 at 13:27 Schadenfreude says:
ATI users used to be able to plug in a cheap, second nVidia card and run the PhysX stuff off that until nVidia cottoned on and locked them out with new driver updates. Bit of a dick move IMO.
23/07/2010 at 20:57 Vandelay says:
That’s ridiculous. No one would ever buy a £120-150 graphics card to replace a perfectly good one just to get some slightly fancy physics effects, but they may spend £30-50. I think it would have been a better business move to let people have both.
23/07/2010 at 13:29 Eggy says:
Hopefully more forgiving does not translate into dumbed down. I love the fact that you couldn’t take 3 full clips but only a few rounds in Mafia 1.
23/07/2010 at 13:39 Sam Crisp says:
Bah, I don’t need fancy hertz and particles and triple screens and PhysX-es to experience immersion! Although to be fair, the trenchcoat physics was mega-sexy.
23/07/2010 at 14:23 Loopy says:
It’s still possible with certain driver combinations:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLUWQyTqbXk
Of course it’ll probably eventually become obsolete as newer drivers become “required” in more advanced games.
23/07/2010 at 14:46 TeeJay says:
So does anyone here actually game in 3d (or have a 120Hz monitor)?
23/07/2010 at 20:03 Jake says:
I am not sure I want to sit in a dark room with 3 monitors and a pair of giant 3d glasses in addition to giant gaming headphones, feeling like some sort of game-playing Cylon.
Actually yes I do, that sounds awesome.
23/07/2010 at 21:42 DarkNoghri says:
I don’t, but I ran into someone once who did. I was playing L4D2 the one night, and a couple of us were having a discussion on graphics cards. I think three of us had ATI, and the fourth was spouting off on how nVidia was so awesome, and so on. Apparently, he was playing in 3D (L4D in 3D? That could get interesting), but we finally asked what card he had that he was bragging about so much. 8800GT or one of the others in that series.
He’s the only guy I’ve ever run into who admitted to using 3D.
23/07/2010 at 14:47 Xercies says:
I disagree with him…1930s cars do look cool.
23/07/2010 at 14:51 Javaguy says:
Look at it this way. Either you own an Nvidia card but can’t use the effects because its not good enough or own an ATI card and don’t use the effects because you can’t.
Because, frankly, you wouldn’t have got a GTX 480, would you?
Also ATI need to starf being a little more pushy about their OpenCL stuff, frankly. They seem to just be sitting around letting Nvidia add these exclusive features.
I must say though, APEX or no I can’t wait for Mafia 2. The original was so, so good.
23/07/2010 at 15:07 Freud says:
At least those with ATI cards can collect the boobie pictures, I hope?
23/07/2010 at 20:12 El Stevo says:
@Freud
The boobies are censored on ATI cards.
23/07/2010 at 20:17 Taillefer says:
“ATI Lacks Boob Support”
25/07/2010 at 05:32 DigitalSignalX says:
No wonder?
23/07/2010 at 15:14 YogSo says:
Meh. Trenchcoat technology was already good enough on the underrated survival horror Nocturne, and that was more than ten years ago. At least they could be using it to power something useful, like a videogame adaptation of The Trenchcoat Brigade.
23/07/2010 at 19:30 Hidden_7 says:
I remember that blowing my mind when I saw it as a kid. Like “OMG! Look at how it goes! This is literally the best graphics any game has ever been!”
Never actually made it any further in that game that messing around in the demo with the trenchcoat. Though, I think I walked into the theatre and a monster showed up and I got scared at being unable to control my guy effectively. Story of my life.
23/07/2010 at 16:17 skyturnedred says:
I’m glad that ATI isn’t fucking with people who might have a different manufacturer’s graphics gard.
23/07/2010 at 17:09 Paul says:
Basically it boils down to this.
nVidia sends several of its engineers into 2K Czech studio for 7 months to integrate PhysX into Mafia 2.
ATi does not such thing, does not have any physics solution and does not work with any devs on any physics ever.
ATi users are angry at nVidia.
23/07/2010 at 17:39 Urthman says:
Yeah, I have no problem with the nVidia thing. If they just created a free Mafia II patch that nVidia owners could download from their website that would add extra physics to the game, everyone would be praising them for providing awesome free content for their customers. This is really no different, except this way nVidia owners don’t even need to download anything.
Also nVidia gets to put their logo on the box. Like that’s never happened before.
23/07/2010 at 19:13 Davie says:
It worries me that the rig they show running this game looks like something a mad scientist created at a rave.
23/07/2010 at 19:47 lhzr says:
i like how John makes it sound like it’s 2K’s fault that ati doesn’t support physx.
23/07/2010 at 21:47 DarkNoghri says:
Is there no other physics engine (like say, Havok), that would run on BOTH cards? It’s not like physx is the only solution possible.
23/07/2010 at 23:28 Paul says:
There is no other physics engine (not even Havok) that allows what physX allows and whose developers will help you for half a year to implement it.
23/07/2010 at 23:30 Paul says:
Not to mention that physx of course runs on BOTH manufacturer’s cards. It’s just that it runs better on one.
24/07/2010 at 01:14 Vandelay says:
Does it run on both cards? I was under the impression that if you enable PhysX without an Nvidia card it is actually being handled by your processor. I recall people saying it was possible to run Batman with it enabled if you had a very good processor (my 2.4GHz quad core couldn’t handle it.)
24/07/2010 at 01:40 InsidiousBoot says:
This is bullshit i don’t believe 1 460GTX can run it on high. I bought the 260GTX’s because i thought i’d could run mafia 2 on high. which it should…. why in the world shouldn’t it be strong enough? mafia 2 doesn’t look that spectacular. I tried Cyrostasis or whatever its called and the physx arent even that awesome. I’m kind of disappointed not only does it impact performance massively its also not that spectacular. So yeah, definitely gonna switch back to ATi again when they release good 6000 series cards. I’m just a bit skeptic about it in a whole..
24/07/2010 at 09:50 ChaK_ says:
I’ll run it on my 4890, without physix, and it’s almost like I don’t care.
Wait ! I DON’T CARE, it’s fact. I don’t think the little improvement is worth the 600€.
as long as I can run it smooth on my ATI i’m fine
24/07/2010 at 11:30 FrownyFace says:
I’m not sure why this is such a GPU-centric discussion.
When I first read about the introduction about multicore CPUs and I was like “FOR WHAT? Like anything that isn’t a DB or video encoder will use them” I was promised that eventually AI and Physics threads would make use of the other 1-7 cores we’re now being marketed.
Why not just use one of my three bored-out-of-their-mind actual, physical CPU cores to throw in some weight for some additional physics calculations?
I’m fairly sure that using all 4 cores instead of “overclocking” a single one with Turboboost is a lot more efficient than one might think and should be able to calculate how a shoulder with a handful of joints and polygons or surfaces or w/e is supposed to move?
And given that both AMD and Intel are now pretty much selling entrylevelish priced CPUs with 4 cores, I’d rather see a more multicore oriented approach towards AI and physics than more GPU solution dependence.
I mean – didn’t we already have pixel precision for hits in Doom 3, a DX 8.1 title, way before PhysX?
We now have oodles more CPU powah available, and cores to boot, why aren’t more things being solved in a generally efficient, smart, all-enabling manner?