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• Both Nvidia and ATI seem to be de-emphasizing the technology behind their respective architectures and focusing more on the features that technology enables. With the Radeon HD 4890, it was DirectX 10.1 and the games leveraging ATI’s unique support for the newer API. Nvidia is putting its muscle into CUDA and PhysX—two value-adds that we’d still consider being in their youth. However, both are certainly receiving plenty of developer attention and are now actually accessible by mainstream customers through a number of third-party applications. Mirror’s Edge was the first app that had enthusiasts actually anticipating PhysX support, and my friend Brandon Bell at FiringSquad already wrote up a nice look at how turning the feature on or off actually affected the look, feel, and performance of Mirror’s Edge. Now Nvidia is talking about another title being patched to include PhysX: Sacred 2. Now, I tried playing through a bit of Sacred and, having come from three too many years of World of Warcraft, this fantasy RPG is much more difficult to get into. The plot just isn’t there. However, the graphics are undeniably lush and the game is supposedly selling well in Europe specifically. And so I cranked the game up to 2560x1600, turned the detail settings up to High, and tested with and without PhysX enabled. It bears note that the PhysX enhancements are very specific. Each class has two different spells that are enhanced with thousands of particles. Moreover, several of the boss fights are also tweaked to include visuals you wouldn’t otherwise see with PhysX turned off. Those few features, sprinkled sparsely throughout the game, wouldn’t have been enough for me. But the environment is also enhanced. Wind, for instance, stirs up leaves, which blow around in fairly believable gusts. Swap back to the non-PhysX version and you really do find yourself asking, “Hey, what the heck happened?” As you can see, PhysX incurs a performance penalty, but nothing like when you try to enable it on a platform that doesn’t support hardware acceleration (the Radeon HD 4890 will do 47.42 frames per second with PhysX off, but only eight with it turned on). True skeptics will wonder about the future of PhysX given its proprietary nature and the recent demonstration of Havok ported to OpenCL. That’s a fair enough concern, and my response would be simply: bank on PhsyX for what it can do today, not the games you hope it’ll materialize in tomorrow. If Mirror’s Edge or Sacred 2 are titles you’ve tried and liked, PhysX will make them more immersive. The technology is, after all, only as good as what it lets you do at present. For those of you wondering more about CUDA, we’ll have a complete look at the current range of GPGPU-accelerated applications a little later this month, including efforts from both ATI and Nvidia. And of course, as ATI furthers its efforts to bring physics acceleration to its own GPUs, we'll cover that in greater depth as well.

• Is Ageia's PhysX Failing?

  BFG Technologies ageia PhysX Physics Card (128MB, PCI) (9 offers) Online shop Price See more products 3D acceleration changes the way the world looks at games. With Vista and DirectX 10 on the horizon, many are looking forward to what geometry shaders, lower system overhead and other developments will do for games. More recently we were introduced to the possibility of accelerating physics calculations and adding effects to currenatt and upcoming game titles. Ageia, ATI, and Nvidia have each put their two cents with respect to physics becoming the next major advancement in computer games. Many in each of these companies predict that physics will add a whole new level to gameplay, similar to what 3D acceleration did for image rendering. The addition of physics that we take for granted everyday will add even more realism and thus a better immersive experience. Hopes have been high for the solution from Ageia, and at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) this year many people were excited about the prospects of more physics and effects in their games. Although there was (and still is) a limited number of software titles that can utilize the Physics Processing Unit (PPU), the hope of seeing more titles emerge at E3 was crushed, as there were only patches to some games and a general lack of new content. Recently we have been getting more glimpses at GPU-accelerated physics, and it raises doubts about Ageia in both the long and short run. Both Nvidia and ATI have been working with Havok, a company which you might have heard of. Havok has been developing and implementing game development tools and engines; its product list includes gameplay physics engines with multi-core and multi-thread support. Now it also has an effects physics engine called Havok FX, which is being used by ATI and Nvidia for their effects physics hardware acceleration. Since the previous article covering the Ageia PhysX processor we have continued our work in the labs to get a better handle on what this hardware can do. There are two titles in development that will utilize the PhysX hardware, both from Immersion Games: Cell Factor Combat Training and Monster Madness. While we don't have a copy of Monster Madness, the Cell Factor demo has been available for some time. We are not positive if Artificial Studios will require a PPU when the games are released; the Cell Factor demo currently requires it, but does it really need it, technically? With some creative help from the gaming community, we tested the game with and without acceleration by the PhysX processor. As you will see, the results are very interesting. Join our discussion on this topic Speak out in the Toms's Hardware reader survey!

• The Scientists' Opinions on Gaming Physics

  Physics has always been part of our games, as the term describes how objects relate to each other and their surroundings. But to render physics in a realistic way, a large number of extremely advanced calculations is required. This demands serious horsepower, which puts more and more strain on the CPU. And as the CPU already handles a lot of other tasks, the idea of a separate hardware unit to take care of physics - just as the GPU handles graphics - has been around for quite a while. Based on that thinking, Ageia created and released their PhysX card. Nvidia and ATI, though, have a different take on the problem, saying that physics can be done just as well, if not better, by adding another GPU to the equation rather than a separate physics processing unit (PPU). So it seems that opinions differ concerning which technique handles physics best. That's why we here at THG had a talk with a couple of scientists, in an attempt to try to shed some new light on this subject. Is physics really that hard to do? Why? And which technology works best? Join our discussion on this topic Speak out in the Toms's Hardware reader survey!