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NVIDIA LAUNCHES PHYSX 3.0 WITH SUPPORT FOR EMERGING GAMING PLATFORMS

By Mike Skolones on

I am very pleased to announce the launch of a brand new version of the very popular NVIDIA PhysX SDK. The new PhysX 3.0 SDK is available to all registered developers on our developer support website located at: http://supportcenteronline.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=1949

PhysX is the world’s most pervasive physics solution for highly realistic and real-time simulation based effects for games, film and more. Version 3.0 of PhysX has been over three years in the making and features a new modular architecture and a completely rewritten PhysX engine. It provides a significant boost in overall performance, as well as efficient, reliable simulations across a broad spectrum of multi-core gaming devices – such as PCs, notebooks and gaming consoles, as well as emerging gaming platforms like handheld game devices, tablets, and smartphones.

Let’s take a look at some of the key features and capabilities of PhysX 3.0 SDK:

  • Larger Levels: Game levels are getting larger these days. That means they require more actors. In PhysX 3.0, developers can combine multiple actors into a single “aggregate”, which is managed as a single bounding-box entity in the broadphase stage of the collision pipeline. This reduces the computing load required to predict collisions between actors, and helps improve overall performance and memory efficiency of PhysX-3 relative to earlier versions.
  • Streaming: PhysX 3.0 enables efficient streaming of asset data into a simulation through a new feature,binary in-place serialization, which allows quick and memory-efficient insertion of actors into a scene. In addition, out-of-scene actor creation, which allows actors to be created outside the scene and stored rather than being created and destroyed on demand, provides developers with better asset management while minimizing troublesome compute load spikes.
  • More Effective Multithreading: The new Task Manager with managed thread pool allows games to take advantage of multi-core processors on all platforms, resulting in greatly increased performance and a much improved gaming experience.
  • Flexible and Powerful Tools: In addition to a highly optimized physics runtime, NVIDIA is  releasing improved tools for artists that have been tailored to work within the developer’s asset production pipeline.  A new release of PhysX Visual Debugger allows superior performance profiling, detailed memory analysis and improved visualization of all PhysX content across all major platforms.

PhysX 3.0 is available for all major gaming platforms, including PC, Xbox360™, PLAYSTATION®3, OSX, Linux and Android. PhysX 3.0 is designed to run on a variety of CPU architectures. Performance can be accelerated by any CUDA™-enabled NVIDIA GPU – including any GeForce 8-series or higher graphics card.

Like its predecessor, PhysX 2.8, the new PhysX 3.0 SDK binary version is available without charge to all registered and platform-authorized developers for both commercial and non-commercial applications.

For more information on NVIDIA PhysX and APEX technologies, please visit: www.nvidia.com/physx.

Sound off in the comments below and let us know what you think.

Thanks and happy gaming!

Categories: Gaming

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  • Frank Busborg

     Extraordinary (-;
    Do you have any video to showcase the new release?

    thx. 
    /Frank

  • http://profiles.google.com/dragonavenger dragon avenger

    Is  particule acceleration compatible with AMD gpu model ?

  • http://twitter.com/MilosDomuz Miloš Domuz

    That’s got to be a joke, right?

  • http://profiles.google.com/dragonavenger dragon avenger

    Why? 

  • Captain Obvious

    lol this is just simple physics that a cpu can handle like the one found in Singularity. Apex still require a CUDA gpu to handle the operations.

  • http://www.facebook.com/NielloEd Niello Ed

    does it require cuda gpus?

  • Anonymous

    Hi, thanks for looking. I’m afraid I don’t have any knock-your-socks-off videos yet. We’re working on it. 
    Thanks,
    Mike

  • Anonymous

    On Windows, the particle system features will run on CPU or on a CUDA-enabled GPU.  On XBox it runs on the CPU (of course), and on PS3 it takes advantage of the SPUs. There is no support yet for CUDA-GPU on Linux or OSX, but we’re looking into it.
    Thanks,
    Mike

  • Anonymous

    A CUDA GPU is not required to run games or applications that use PhysX simulation. Certain PhysX features can be accelerated by a CUDA GPU, but they will also run on a PC CPU, or on the hardware provided in Xbox, PS3 and other platforms that PhysX supports. In PhysX-2.x, cloth and particles could be accelerated by CUDA-enabled GPUs. In PhysX-3.0 we have provided a GPU-acceleratable particle system feature; in PhysX-3.1, which is coming soon, a new implementation of PhysX cloth will be accelerated by CUDA-enabled GPUs, and will provide improved performance and behavior on all platforms, regardless of GPU acceleration.

    Thanks,
    Mike

  • Anonymous

    Yes, most games that use PhysX rely on it for gameplay physics such as collision detection, rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, scene queries, vehicle controllers and character controllers, etc. This type of physics is always run on a CPU because it needs to be tightly integrated with other game systems such as animation, AI and rendering. Effects such as destruction, simulated smoke or fog, clothing, etc., can be run on the GPU. APEX 1.2 will provide GPU-enabled effects using simulation provided by PhysX-3.1.