A few members of our development team recently took part in a roundtable discussion with NVIDIA and several media outlets to shed some light on how NVIDIA’s PhysX is used in our upcoming FPS, Darkest of Days.
One feature definitely worth mentioning is NVIDIA’s GPU acceleration for PhysX. The ability to compute PhysX on the GPU has been incredible for us, and truly has taken the level of naturalism in our environments to a much higher level. With that feature enabled, we are able to fill our battlefield’s with thousands more physically-active particles — everything ranging from leaves blowing through the fields with each gust of wind to the billowing smoke clouds and dirt clods thrown up by every artillery strike.
Screenshots and videos of the effects in action will be coming, but in the meantime:
Find out more by visiting the latest headlines at NVIDIA’s nZone.
NVIDIA is doing a bit of work publicizing titles using its PhysX technology, including Darkest of Days. A press release sent out today contains some info about the game, a few new screen shots, and of course plenty about PhysX. You can read it here.
PhysX is part of an interesting trend toward moving more non-graphics computation onto the GPU. 8monkey is currently conducting some research into adding some GPU simulated particles and fluids to Darkest of Days with PhysX. Expect more developments in this area soon.
Mostly for kicks, Andres has been working on a fluid dynamics demo.  This video is of PhysX fluid particles being simulated on the GPU and rendered in the Marmoset Engine (in a Toolbag module actually).  A fountain of 20,000 particles is being simulated by one GeForce 8800 GTS and being drawn by another GeForce 8800 GTS runs at 50 fps on a good day, though no actual optimization work has been done. This demo does serve a purpose: it is preparation for our super-cool, super-secret tech plans this summer.
