Demos for new physics technologies usually look like Bodyform commercials, with gentle blue water sloshing around and lots of smooth rippling fabric. That’s how Nvidia have shown their new unified particle-based physics tech PhysX Flex so far – lots of rubbery water balloons flopping about and leaking blue wet. Pssh, it won’t look like that in the games we actually play.
Killing Floor 2 [official site] will be the first Flex-using game to ship, and a new look at how it uses the tech is more how Bodyform ads should be: scattering gutfuls of fluids, globs, and guts.
I feel like I should apologise for the headline but Nvidia call their middleware physics engine PhysX, for crying out loud. ‘Making a splash’ is almost Nabokovian in comparison. You may recall recent advances in convincing/crazed coiffures and I care about that about as much as I care about the latest floppy-fringed hair fashions in the real world. Not a jot. Fluid physics though? Ever since the invention of physics, which was sometime just before I balanced bricks on a plank to create a see-saw bridge in Half Life 2, I’ve been waiting for a game with proper water. The latest PhysX tech demo got my juices flowing and you can see it below.
Handsome Hawken is ever more handsome – or at least that’s the intention – thanks to implementation of Nvidia’s PhysX tech. The new trailer (Below) shows how PhysX improves particles and debris in the world, creating effect that is partly awesome and partly, well, gaudy. I get that this stuff is super clever, mathematically speaking, but some of the particle effects just seem over the top to me. I suppose that’s the point, because it makes it stand out, but I suspect that this kind of stuff will only really sit comfortably when it’s used in a more subtle way.
Borderlands 2 will have guns. Of all the things in the entire universe I’d be absolutely, un-hesitantly comfortable staking my life on, that’d rank only behind “Texas is warm” and “Borderlands 2 will have lands.” Gearbox, though, wants to set its more-than-87-bazillion guns apart from the rest of the industry’s comparatively tasteful collection of 63 trillion, so it’s attempting to infuse real personality into brands this time around. If you delve into the vault beyond the break, you won’t find some bizarro squid god, but you will come away with three very silly gun “commercials” and (bonus!) an impressive showcase of BL2’s PC-only PhysX features.
You may remember Kieron doing science a few weeks back about NVIDIA’s CUDA system – clever trickery that allows a GPU to perform processing feats other than pixel-pushing. There’s a lot of real-world algorithm-crunching applications for it, but of most interest to gamers is that it can make your GeForce 8, 9 or 200-series card behave like a PhysX board. NVIDIA bought out PhysX makers Ageia a while back, and we’re soon to see the fruits of such money-labours.
The big question is to what extent simulating cratesplosion will slow down the graphics rendering. We’ll get to find out next week, with the release of the GeForce Experience Pack. Read the rest of this entry »
And because I like my shout-out to lovefoxx strap for this piece so much, I’m going to re-use it here. The most influential man in British videogames journalism, Eurogamer’s Tom Bramwell, showed the sheer extent of his influentialitude by making me trot off and actually cover a hardware event. Me! In this case, NVIDIA talking about their near-future plans involving – basically – allowing you to turn your 3D card into a PhysX card via software and even repurposing your old 3D card as a PhysX one when you upgrade. Apparently. They could have told me computers would be able to produce milk and I’d have been equally credulous. Go read here. There are jokes and local colour.
I’ve got an Ageia PhysX card sat around somewhere, a piece of hardware about which I wasn’t entirely complimentary a while back. I don’t use it because a) there’s yet to be a PhysX-enabled game which I’ve wanted to play for any reasonable length of time and b) it’s one more furiously spinning fan in a PC that I can already hear humming like the wrath of Skynet, even when I’m on the next floor of the house.
But maybe, I thought, Unreal Tournament 3 would be the game to change all that. Eyecandy junkie that I am, I was quite looking forward to testing the explodability of the PhysX-only bonus maps. Tech know-all types Bit-Tech have kind of talked me out of it before I’ve even got a copy of the game, with one page of their typically graphics-centric review of UT3 putting the boot particularly hard into the PhysX stuff. The screenshots sure look good, but it sounds very much as though my feelings about earlier games with PhysX support tending to end up looking like an explosion in a polystyrene factory aren’t going to change any time soon. Worse still, it seems the super-duper maps run at under 10 fps. That’s an ultra-whoops for Ageia, surely. Oh well. I may still be able to summon the energy to remove my PysX card from its dusty anti-static bag once I’ve got hold of UT3, but don’t bank on it.
So, what now for this increasingly beleagured hardware experiment? Can it possibly recover from even its most high-profile implementation turning out to be a little bit tragic? And does anyone else reading this have a PhysX board?
