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NVIDIA To Showcase PhysX Content
Early next week, NVIDIA will release the GeForce Experience Pack to demonstrate the 'PhysX' engine it bought from AGEIA earlier this year. The pack is free, and it will contain a stand-alone action game, maps for Unreal Tournament 3, and various demos. Gamasutra notes that the UT3 maps are "designed to 'fundamentally change' the game's mechanics."
Technically speaking, visuals can have a profound effect on gameplay.
That said, I'm also waiting for someone to do something interesting with hardware-accelerated physics.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
abound everytime the name Nvidia pops up. Im not sure I understand how buying and adapting PhysX into the company makes the company a bad guy. If you have Nvidia and PhysX capable hardware... then in games that are coded for it they will look prettier, more realistisc perhaps. If you do not have the hardware you wont see those effect. I do not understand how that makes Nvidia wrong or open to ridicule. I would think the comments that are negative may be biased because the poster had a bad experience with an Nvidia product. People need to exhale and relax....it's all small stuff.
they want to use physx because as is clear right now, nobody other than Nvidia can use it 100% accurately yet.
Maybe because NVIDIA acquired AGEIA, which is the company that made the original PhysX cards.
That's a bit like saying "Nobody other than Microsoft can do .NET 100% accurately yet," only moreso, because at least Microsoft is pretending .NET is portable. I'm not sure PhysX was ever meant to be. (Consider the -X ending, implying DirectX, rather than something like PhysicsGL, or PhysL, implying OpenGL -- you know, the actually portable industry standard for graphics.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I remember, many moons ago, when the PhysX cards were gaining some king of industry momentum. I wouldn't call it acceptance, but it definitely wasn't a complete disregard either.
I think one of the big problems here is that between AMD and NVIDIA there are only two major market forces -- both of whom are no where near on a lovey-dovey level, and definitely no where near sharing ideas (read licensing) stuff between them. So if NVIDIA gets this PhysX stuff working from AEGIA, marvelous, but it will be completely ignored by the ATI/AMD crowd. And if the better share of 50% of the marketplace is ignoring this, it is simply not in game designers' best interests to waste development time and money on something.
Really, I could see this type of technology being similar to the PS*2* HDD -- barely ever used.
"I can't think of a particular game where the physics were essential to the gameplay"
Portal.
QED.
"Perhaps with some hardware acceleration, we'll see some really destructible environments in games."
These days I have very little faith in games. All this physics acceleration is just a gimmick to make money. Game companies aren't into making fun or innovative games anymore, they're all about graphics and gimmicks. So you can blow up walls, big deal. You could do that in Blood, but it didn't require any special hardware to do it. Plus Blood was actually f-u-n.
I have nothing compelling to say