As you can see, there are thousands of objects on the decks below.

One game demo that has increased the number of objects in a scene is Cell Factor - Combat Training. This demo was created to show the power of the Ageia's PhysX processor. People at GDC marveled at the scenes they were looking at - the demo included high dynamic range (HDR) lighting, simulations for cloth and fluids, and of course, tens of thousands of objects the player could blow up into even more pieces, hurl as weapons and play catch with. The demo was made available to the world on Ageia's website and several others, but it required the user have a PhysX PPU accelerator card. It was truly exciting to see this in action; it made people believe in the need for dedicated physics acceleration.

This was the typical error message users would get before they could disable the need for the PhysX card.

That was the case until the end of April, when the community figured out how to tweak the Cell Factor demo to run without the PhysX card. One of the members of our forums showed people how to play the demo without the PhysX card. The fix is simple: all you have to do is alter the command line in the shortcut to the demo on your desktop and, abracadabra, you now have a working demo that runs perfectly without the "required" hardware.

The only way to toggle the PhysX card is to disable it in the Device Manager or physically remove it from the system.