GPU PhysX support in Mafia II, highly anticipated mobster crime drama from 2K Czech, is not a secret for certain time, and recently official press-release, along with three new screenhots, were revealed.

The integration of PhysX and NVIDIA APEX technology, including the APEX Clothing and Particle modules, enable the city and personalities of Empire Bay to truly come alive on Windows PC. The NVIDIA APEX Clothing module allows for more dynamic movement in clothing, making in-game characters even more realistic and reactive to environmental conditions.

With the implementation of NVIDIA APEX Particles, players are engulfed in lifelike explosions that are bigger and brighter, including weapon fragments, in-game debris and destructible environments that are amplified in both quantity and realism through the integration of APEX Particles. For example, a pistol fired into a glass pane will emit hundreds of glass shards; a shotgun blasted through a wooden landing will splinter the wood; and a Tommy Gun will chip into a brick or stone wall to methodically fracture and break it into pieces.

An addition to hardware accelerated PhysX content, PC version of Mafia II will feature 3D Vision support. Mafia II will be available in North America on August 24, 2010, and internationally on August 27, 2010.

P.S. We are pleased to see that APEX is finding it’s way to more and more games. In case you’re not familar with it, Nvidia APEX is physics effects creation and management system, build on top of PhysX SDK.

Idea behind APEX is simple -  it gives developers free tools to create complex physics content, like character clothing (bonus for developers), and has ability to scale such content through different platforms easily (read – add more details on PC, bonus for Nvidia). In theory – everybody wins. However, until APEX will be released to public (now it’s available for certains devs only), we won’t see if it works fully as intended.