Sneak preview of first Nvidia PhysX Games

Posted at: Wednesday 6th August 2008 by Clive Webster and Antony Leather

A first look at the next generation of gameplay and graphical effects made possible with Physics on GPU

The future of graphics is physics, or so Nvidia and ATI believe. Physics promises to make games look more realistic, to give you more options when you’re playing and to make the objects of a game behave exactly as they should. We take a sneak peak at all the physics patches and upcoming games that Nvidia will be launching on 19 August.

Nvidia has sent us patches for Unreal Tournament 3, Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2, plus Warmonger and Metal Knight Zero. We’ve also got our hands on two new tech demos to show off the power of running the PhysX physics API on an Nvidia GeForce graphics card. Note that only GeForce 8-series and later graphics cards are capable of running PhysX as CUDA support is required.

The benefits of advanced physics modelling in games are twofold: you get better visuals with certain types of object and events, and you can get more freedom with how you play the game. These two benefits are typically referred to as Effects Physics and Gameplay Physics and are separated for good reason, as they affect games in entirely different ways. Nvidia’s PhysX is capable of doing both types.

Nvidia released the ForceWare 177.79 driver, PhysX 8.07.18 driver and a range of patches for games and 3DMark Vantage on 12 August. Visit the Nvidia website to download it.


Throughout this feature, we’ll take a look at what physics can bring to games, before exploring the updates to the games mentioned above. Click the links at the bottom to find out more.