Nvidia Appreciation Logs: PhysX®

Only available for the PC on NVIDIA® GeForce® GPUs, NVIDIA® PhysX® technology delivers real-time, hyper-realistic physical and environmental gaming effects in the games you want to play today and tomorrow. “Canned” reactions are a thing of the past – PhysX-powered games comes to life with blazing explosions, reactive debris, realistic water, and lifelike character motion.

What is NVIDIA PhysX Technology?
NVIDIA^® PhysX^® is a powerful physics engine enabling real-time physics in leading edge PC games. PhysX software is widely adopted by over 150 games and is used by more than 10,000 developers. PhysX is optimized for hardware acceleration by massively parallel processors. GeForce GPUs with PhysX provide an exponential increase in physics processing power taking gaming physics to the next level.

What is physics for gaming and why is it important?
Physics is the next big thing in gaming. It's all about how objects in your game move, interact, and react to the environment around them. Without physics in many of today's games, objects just don't seem to act the way you'd want or expect them to in real life. Currently, most of the action is limited to pre-scripted or ‘canned' animations triggered by in-game events like a gunshot striking a wall. Even the most powerful weapons can leave little more than a smudge on the thinnest of walls; and every opponent you take out, falls in the same pre-determined fashion. Players are left with a game that looks fine, but is missing the sense of realism necessary to make the experience truly immersive.

With NVIDIA PhysX technology, game worlds literally come to life: walls can be torn down, glass can be shattered, trees bend in the wind, and water flows with body and force. NVIDIA GeForce GPUs with PhysX deliver the computing horsepower necessary to enable true, advanced physics in the next generation of game titles making canned animation effects a thing of the past.

Which NVIDIA GeForce GPUs support PhysX?
GeForce 8 series GPUs and higher all support PhysX.

Why is a GPU good for physics processing?
The multithreaded PhysX engine was designed specifically for hardware acceleration in massively parallel environments. GPUs are the natural place to compute physics calculations because, like graphics, physics processing is driven by thousands of parallel computations. Today, NVIDIA's GPUs, have as many as 480 cores, so they are well-suited to take advantage of PhysX software. NVIDIA is committed to making the gaming experience exciting, dynamic, and vivid. The combination of graphics and physics impacts the way a virtual world looks and behaves.

In layman's terms, PhysX makes everything that's encoded with NVIDIA^® PhysX^® act like they do in real life. This way, you get ultra-realistic gaming using NVIDIA^® GeForce^® GPUs.

A video of the comparison of PhysX ON versus OFF in a PhysX game Mirror's Edge will be available below. Mind you, it's a bit fuzzy