NVIDIA® PhysX® technology continues to be the platform of choice for interactive entertainment. NVIDIA is making a number of new announcements on PhysX-enabled games and has been conducting developer roundtables with members of the press so they have a chance to discuss PhysX implementation with the developers directly.

The following interview is one of many developer roundtables to come, with each one highlighting a specific upcoming game.


Will the environments be able to hurt the characters and enemies?

Evolved Games: What we’re trying to do is to simulate the entire experience. There are sequences in the game where this does happen. It’s not new for the PhysX of course, but in the game, it’s just going to be more believable and you’re going to get more sucked into the game.

Did you plan on using the PhysX elements from the start or did you add that as you moved forward in development?

We’ve actually had the PhysX stuff working for years now. We did a lot of work together with Ageia, way back even on Graw. So it’s in the Graw games, but also the Bionic Commando and now Terminator. So yea.

You guys have been extraordinarily busy this year. You’ve got Bionic Commando and Terminator coming out next month. How has it been working with all of those different games out seemingly all at once?

First of all it’s a lot of fun to do! It’s just fun to do games. So that’s been the positive side of that. And you can’t really complain if you’re busy in this industry, so you don’t really have anything negative to say about that! It’s cool to work on different things because you get different experiences and you learn a lot instead of churning away on the same game all over again every year. So we like changing it up and trying different things. It’s been a great experience.

And just a follow-up, I’m sure you guys have got some projects that are in the pipeline. Are you planning on perhaps expanding your PhysX effects to your future titles and can you give us some examples on what you’d like to do in terms of the PhysX you’d like to do in future games?

Yea, we’re going to keep doing support for PhysX, yes.

Are there any extra special effects that you haven’t been able to do in previous games? Are you planning on putting any PhysX extra features that might affect game play per se?

We will be integrating Apex and use that for future titles. That will show-up not just on the PC, but will be cross-platform.

This one is pretty close to release. Is there a demo or a beta?

The game will launch in May with the movie release and we will release a PhysX-accelerated-based fly-through that we can make available to press when the game comes out. But the full implementation of the GPU-accelerated PhysX version with the PC will actually come out with our first downloadable content pack.

As GPUs are more and more programmable, do you think that future games using software rendering running on GPUs and DirectX or OpenGL APIs will become less important?

I think that is still very much an open question and something that the future will have to prove what the future technology develops.

Will you have the built-in benchmarks that editors can use to help them save time while benchmarking?

Yes, but that was planned for the fly-through. I mean that will be a benchmark, and it will be a useful benchmark to compare speeds from different platforms.