The following is a demo of CellFactor which has been designed as the first game to use the new Physics Card technology that people seem to be talking about over in the hardware/software forum.
The problem was that you need one of these cards to run the demo, however if you append the following onto the end of the games shortcut
EnablePhysX=false
you can play the demo to check it out.
Sensus of opinion seems to be that with a high end graphics card, turning the PhysX card off or on doesn't make a huge difference, other than very tiny little delays/lag of objects moving on the screen, but not enough to spoil it.
It's on youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSeW9NejxLo but I wondered what it plays like on your machines, as I am going to give it a go on mine which isn't great, to see how badly it struggles in comparison to say Mani4chicken's setup and so on...
Just trying to work out if this Physics Card nonsense really is a load of nonsense.
Well on maximum everything it kills a 7950 no problem, however everything set to medium and its ok. Looks shiny and the amount of items on creen is incredible. I dont think ill bother with the cards yet until more developers adopt the physx way of life.
Yes, you can fire a hundred simple objects about really easily.
However, the liquid and fabric stuff is massively complex and will bring your computer to it's knees pretty sharpish.
I feel some level of physics processing is inevitable - Though, what remains to be seen is how much is needed.
If the current rumours* are true, I suspect we'll see a hybrid, with the CPU doing the simple stuff like shitloads of boxes, and the GPU doing the pretty stuff like water that doesn't have to interact fully with users.
*That GPU physics works well for visual stuff, but is too high latency for interactable objects
