We had the privilege to start our Nvision show by talking to Vice President of Content Relations, Roy Taylor, and we spent quite some time talking about The Way It’s Meant To Be Played with a big focus on PhysX.
There are about 25 games coming out supporting PhysX before the end of the year and another 25 between January and March 2009. This is an impressive number but Physics in games is tough for developers and here is one reason why.
Today’s games have what we can call fixed state physics, and Havok or any other physics API is not running on a GPU can’t make physics scale. To enable scaling developers must construct objects with this in mind from the beginning of the development cycle. This is why it’s taking time to get really dramatic physics into games but when the arrive they will be so impressive.
For example, if you want to blow up a car into a hundred pieces you have to model the car from a hundred pieces. The base line experience for a console or software PC physics on a CPU will be fixed at the lowest common denominator. This might mean only destroying the car into 10 of the 100 available pieces.
As you can see everything in San Jose is green.
With Nvidia’s PhysX and a high-end card you will be able to use all of the 100 pieces available. Blow the car into 100 pieces with Geforce 9800 GX2, while with a card such as 8800GT you might be limited to 50. The high-end card will make PhysX better and this is a simplification that can help us illustrate why it is taking so much time to make physics look so dramatic and cool. It is also why the recent announcements of Emergent’s Gambryo, the second biggest selling game engine after Epic (Unreal engine 3), which, of course, also uses PhysX.
With this kind of dramatic game play included when possible it's easy to see why Nvidia is having so much success to establish a PhysX as a new standard.
Roy was kind enough to share some videos with me where you can see a very good in game Physics, such as in cloth destruction and particle effects. We have seen some very realistic explosions, better than anything we’ve seen in games today and it is really cool to see that your machine gun can tear a flag apart. We hope that Nvidia will show these videos soon enough, but we can tell that it does looks great.