NVIDIA PhysX SDK brought to the Wii

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It was only last week that NVIDIA announced they had made their PhysX SDK available for the Playstation 3. This week, NVIDIA have announced they are bringing PhysX to the Nintendo Wii, by making the PhysX SDK available to registered Nintendo Wii developers. The SDK becomes available as a result of NVIDIA becoming approved as a third party tools solution provider for the Nintendo Wii console.

Although the SDK is available to registered Wii developers, licensed versions of the SDK cost, according to the website, "US$50K Per Individual application," which could be a reason explaining NVIDIA's urge to make PhysX cross platform.

"Nintendo has reshaped the home entertainment and video game market with the success of the Wii console. Adding a PhysX SDK for Wii is key to our cross-platform strategy and integral to the business model for our licensed game developers and publishers," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. PhysX is now supported on the PC, Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii.

Contrary to popular belief, PhysX does not always require a NVIDIA CUDA enabled card, nor a dedicated physics processor. These only accelerate it, and sometimes hardware acceleration is not required in order to utilize the PhysX engine. It is not entirely clear how game developers for the Wii will implement PhysX technology in their games, however it is not likely to be to the same extent as it is with the PC and Xbox 360 (and Playstation 3 as more games use it), due to technical limitations.

(1 reply) #1 Beastage on 21 Mar 2009 - 23:59

While the PS3 is powered by a powerful cell processor (and an old gpu) I really don't see how the wii will manage the added demands of running physx.

#1.1 Dessimat0r on 22 Mar 2009 - 00:46

It'd work quite well for simple physics-based games. Boom Blox probably uses a similar API

(1 reply) #2 m-p{3} on 22 Mar 2009 - 02:22

I don't see much companies (especially indies that could gain some ground with innovative games) either that would be able to afford this SDK at US$50K per games.

#2.1 Sazz181 on 22 Mar 2009 - 08:33

My understanding is that they only have to get the licensed copy if they want to edit the SDK for their own purposes.

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