(Image credit: GameSpot)
Electronic Arts utilized NVIDIA's PhysX technology for the forthcoming Mirror's Edge on PC, and now have signed on, along with Take-Two Interactive, to license it as a development platform. What's this mean for you? More realistic PC gaming from these two from now on, essentially. Brooke Crothers of CNet explains how it works very well, if you happen to be unfamiliar:
The goal of Nvidia's technology -- based on the laws of physics -- is to make game objects respond in a realistic way to physical events. More conventional technology uses a canned response, in which the same response is repeated over and over. For example, a window breaks, or a person falls the same way every time. In a PhysX-enabled football sports game, however, the angle and velocity of the impact is calculated by the GPU to generate a real-time response that is different every time.
We can see a good illustration of this in the Mirror's Edge PhysX comparison video:
Whether or not it's worth it to most gamers is another story, but presumably this will become the mainstream within the next few years, so it's something to look forward to. 100 million chips out there are already capable, anyway. As for how many are sold, well, that's something else.
AMD users are on a different path with game physics -- Korhan Erenben, product marketing manager at AMD Graphics Products Group explains:
"The GPU is a great place to do processing. We'll do the offloading (to the GPU), where it makes sense. (But) we are aligned with Havok, in terms of working on a future direction of physics. Right now, it is on the CPU, and we think that serves the broad installed base. Taking it to the next step would be to have a capability on the GPU--where and when it makes sense."
