NVIDIA announced in a press release today that it has signed an agreement which will allow registered PS3 developers free access to the binary version of the NVIDIA PhysX software development kit (SDK). The kit will allow developers to create games (more likely to be modifications to existing games to begin with) which will feature the same physics-based effects that PC gamers have had recently (for a limited number of games)."Games developed for the PLAYSTATION 3 using PhysX technology offer a more realistic and lifelike interaction between the games characters and other objects within the game. We look forward to the new games that will redefine reality for a new generation of gamers," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA.
There have been no announcements of the first PS3 games featuring PhysX technology, and it is not clear if support for existing games will be made available later on.
Support for PhysX has still been surprisingly low, even since NVIDIA took over. However, by opening it up to PS3s as well as PCs, the technology might become more popular. The technology has only been used for small, insignificant parts of the games it has been implemented into, typically only being used for the "tear" effect, or breaking glass effects (as it was in Mirrors Edge), as of yet. However, hopefully, as it gains popularity, it will play larger parts in games, offering more realistic gaming.
Technically, no. The Xbox 360 uses an ATI graphics card, and Ageia PhysX was bought out by NVIDIA not too long ago, so PhysX is now pretty much NVIDIA-exclusive, but on the upside, before NVIDIA bought them out, you could only use PhysX through a PhysX card in your PC; now, it works through software.
Remind me which games the PS3 'chokes' on?
What it does, if you program for it, allow you to offload processing away from the cpu of certain stuff (such as physics), which in turn gives your a performance boost in your game.
Again, that is if your games is programmed for this function. By there statement, to use this feature for the ps3, the game company had to pay money (license), now it's free.
Intel bought Havok engine (which does physics's processing) and gives it away for free which Amd is working to use there alternate stream processing for hardware acceleration. Makes sense that nvidia is doing this, since it's going to be a future war with Nvidia PhysX vs Ati Stream processing (with Intel's Havok engine thrown in)
I always thought it was based on G70/NV47 (geforce 7800).
Nvidia then incorporated it in to the Gefore 8x cards later.
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