NVIDIA PhysX 3.0 Unveiled

Nvidia announced today "PhysX 3.0", updating the most ambitious ever of the physics engine to improve the realism of certain phenomena (impact and particles) in video games. For this major update, the engine "PhysX" has actually been completely rewritten.

This helped to begin to expand the number of platforms on which it operates. "PhysX" now works on Mac OS over Windows and Linux, and Android over the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Its rewriting has also greatly optimized the hardware support. At a time when they are democratizing in all areas, it can now take advantage of multicore processors regardless of the platform, in addition to being effectively accelerated by the massively parallel architecture of some GPUs (starting naturally those by Nvidia).

"PhysX 3.0" also opens the way for the greatest level design, allowing developers to combine several elements into a single aggregate to reduce resource consumption. In the same spirit, version 3.0 also introduces the streaming, which loads new elements on the fly to save memory.

The announcement of "PhysX 3.0" coincides precisely with the launch of the appropriate SDK, a development kit with which the video game developers can now benefit from these innovations. The output of games taking advantage no longer depends only on them.

What I have heard is that several improvements are also up to date with the PhysX SDK 3.0, namely a reduction of the load calculation for collisions, a more efficient multithreading to take advantage of multicore processors in games, streaming to insert more quickly graphics without sacrificing performance, and a range of flexible tools that allow developers to increase efficiency. This is going to be a new gaming era for sure.