Nightlife

It was just a matter of time for proper PhysX drivers for nVidia cards to show after NVidia bought Ageia.
PhysX (formerly Novodex SDK) running on GPU can bring us lots of advantages (read: more FPS, better effects) without having the need for specialized hardware.

It would be nothing special about that as currently it is possible for any physics simulation engine to use CUDA or OpenCL to make people feel power of modern GPUs, but NVidia by buying PhysX made it possible for lots of games to be supported 'automagically'.

One of such games is Unreal Tournament III for which NVidia/Ageia released special PhysX mod featuring 3 extra maps.

The first and most obvious thing when you enable HW PhysX in UT3 is that game's running faster. That's nothing as I cannot really tell the difference between 100 and 120 FPS Especially if my LCD refreshes with 75 Hz The real difference starts when you try one of three special maps: HeatRay_PhysX, Tornado_PhysX or Lighthouse_PhysX. Then you can see what PhysX acceleration is all about... Just to mention hundreds, or rather thousands of flying around particles, hail, destructible wooden elements, brick walls (not all though ) and really awesome tornado.

Below you can see some screenshots I took today:








Apart games - there are of course some PhysX demos available as well. Here you can see screenshots from fluid demo and PhysX screensaver - both available here.