Multiplayer online shooter “Passion Leads Army” (PLA), currently in development by Giant Interactive in cooperation with the Chinese military, was firstly showcased (as a real-time benchmark demo) during Jen-Hsun Huang Keynote at NVIDIA Gaming Festival.

Featuring full DX 11 support (for the first time – in Chinese game) and intense GPU PhysX effects, this UE3 based title has drawn much attention of the audience.

Now, public release of PLA Benchmark gives us the opportunity to try it out by ourselves.

Update: PLA Benchmark overview at GeForce.com

Following DX11 effects can be seen in the benchmark:

• Tesselation.
• Horizon-Based Ambient Occlusion (HBAO).
• Bokeh-DOF effect.

As for GPU PhysX content, it includes:

• GPU accelerated rigid bodies (destruction scenes).
• APEX Particles effects (leafs, sparks, debris, dynamic fog).
• Interactive and tearable PhysX cloth objects.

In overall, we must admit that PLA demo leaves a very good impression – high-fidelity picture and rich physical effects, coupled with unusually stable framerate.

i7 2600k CPU, GTX 580, 8 GB DDR3, Win 7 x64, 1680x1050, High DX 11 in-game preset, High textures.

Unfortunately, PLA does not allow us to measure performance of CPU execution of PhysX effects – if PhysX is disabled in driver, only “PhysX OFF” option will be available in-game.

Now, the only question remains – how to download it? Several Chinese websites are offereing download mirrors, for example:

Plagame.cn (direct link) or games.sina.com (direct link).

Update: More mirrors – Gamefront, drivetoGo, GeForce.com (new).

Note: Installer can be switched to English language. Benchmark itself also has English interface.

And don’t forget to share your benchmark results !

P.S. Passion Leads Army is slated to be released in Q4 2012.