X-bit labs

Thursday, May 4, 2006

AGEIA PhysX in Action. Available on Video

Once some hardware enthusiasts got their hands on the first cards on the new AGEIA PhysX accelerator, the first performance reports and feedback started penetrating into the web. As the benchmark results indicated, AGEIA PhysX didn’t improve the performance in any way. The improved visual quality of gaming physics is a very amorphous characteristic that can hardly be estimated from the quantitative standpoint. The best way to investigate the advantages of having AGEIA PhysX in your system is to take a closer look at the videos recorded from real games played on systems featuring the new card.

Luckily, our colleagues from PC Prospective web-site managed to run Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Cell Factor games on an AGEIA PhysX equipped system. The first game is not optimized in any specific way for the new PhysX solution but allows to slightly improve the realism of some visual effects such as smoke and dust, small parts of objects ripped off by the bullets. All these things look much more realistic with the new AGEIA PhysX card.

The screenshot on the left is taken from the Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter game without the AGEIA PhysX, on the right you can see the same scene with the new physics accelerator. Those of you shop have high-speed unlimited internet connection can also download a few movies (one of them is 245MB big).

Cell factor game is specifically optimized for the new AGEIA PhysX processor, so the corresponding accelerator allows to significantly increase the realism of interacting objects. The only problem is that these optimized games will look not very impressive without the AGEIA solution and may even refuse to start at all if there is no physics accelerator in the system. The game developers are facing a very hard choice in this case: they can either develop universal games that would have minor effects improvement with PhysX, or develop specifically optimized games that will work only on systems supporting “physics acceleration technologies”. The latter way may attract more game developers as the corresponding hardware and software interfaces emerge.

• PC Perspective: AGEIA PhysX PPU Videos - Ghost Recon and Cell Factor