Almost four years has passed since NVIDIA aquired Ageia and presented their version of hardware accelerated PhysX Technology. However, anyone who is watching GPU PhysX progress closely can say, that so far it has not shown any significant advancement – but is the fight already lost or is it just taking time to harness up, but will ride fast?

We got a chance to chat with Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President of Content & Technology in NVIDIA, Ashu Rege, Vice President of Content & Technology, and Rev Lebaredian, Director of Engineering, to clear up these questions, and recieve some insider information on future development plans for PhysX SDK and NVIDIA APEX toolset.

PhysXInfo.com: Over last years, amount of GPU PhysX games is actually decreasing. There were five games in 2009, three in 2010 and so far only one in 2011. How can you explain that?

Tony Tamasi: It was a choice on our part. We had a large amount of resources we could otherwise dedicate to content, but we needed to advance the core technology. We needed to get PhysX 3 done, and we needed to get APEX done to the degree where it is usable by game developers. We had to put a lot of resources there, which meant that some of those resources weren’t directly working on games.

But in the long term, game developers can actually use PhysX and APEX, and make use of the GPU without significant amounts of effort, so that a year or two years from now more games will come out using GPU physics.

Alice: Madness Returns - most recent GPU PhysX title

Rev Lebaredian: When we initially acquired Ageia, we made a big effort to move many games over to GPU PhysX. We learned a lot in that period of time: getting GPU physics into games, what are the problems, what works and what doesn’t. That gave us the opportunity to regroup, refocus, and figure out how to do it correctly.

We made a conscious decision. After we did a bunch of PhysX and APEX games in 2009 and early 2010, we said “Ok, we have learned enough, we need to sit down and focus on finishing APEX and changing it based on what we just learned, as well as PhysX 3”. Doing as many titles as we were doing before was just going to slow us down.

It made more sense to slow down the content pipeline but get the tools right, but that puts us in the position when once those are complete, it is actually less work for us to get PhysX in games.

This slowdown has not been because of any problems. It is something that we have decided to do.

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NVIDIA has has published a nice video, that is showcasing technical demo called “Glowball”, running on their next quad-core mobile chip known as “Project Kal-EL” or Tegra 3, presumably.

Glowball demo features some complex (for a mobile device) real-time dynamic lighting and shadowing effects, and decent level of PhysX based physics calculations – rigid body barrels and drapes, fully simulated as cloth obejcts.

Cloth simulation is partically interesting: scene contains 10 drapes, likely 100-150 vertices each, affected by gravity and board movement, calculated simultaneously – new kind of physics effects for mobile devices. This tech can be used not necessarily for flags or banners, but for dynamic clothing on characters, for example.

Demo was running on PhysX SDK 2.8.4.5.

Update: More physical demos on Tegra 3 platform

Mobile devices are interesting environment for PhysX SDK to evolve and adapt, so we are eager to see how things will play out in this direction.

Since March version of Unreal Development Kit, that has brought us NVIDIA APEX integration, users are playing with the new features trying to figure out their capabilities and limitations.

One of the most noticeable examples is this Destruction Project by the user named RU1NOUS. Even in current state it is demostrating nice a clean level design, good usage of general APEX Destruction features and interaction of APEX actors with tearable cloth objects.

Currently, APEX Destruction still requires a lot of work to make it really powerful and practical fracturing/destruction simulation tool, so let’s hope NVIDIA has all necessary additions on the roadmap.

We’ll try to keep the eye on RU1NOUS’s work and will update this post accordingly.

If you are know PhysX only as GPU accelerated physics effects for PC games, lack of news and announcements of new GPU PhysX titles may give you an idea that NVIDIA has decided to drop support for PhysX completely. Forum threads like “Is PhysX Dead?” or “Physx dead?“, popping up from time to time, are indicating – users are worried.

We were able to contact NVIDIA and Mike Skolones, product manager for PhysX, has revealed us the company’s plans regarding PhysX Technology.

PhysXInfo.com: Is PhysX still playing important role for NVIDIA ? Are you planning to use and evolve the PhysX Technology over the years, or thinking about abandoning it in a favor for other solutions ?

Mike Skolones: PhysX has been and continues to play an important role for NVIDIA, as well as for the thousands of game developers who use PhysX for physics simulation across a broad range of platforms, including PC, Xbox360, PLAYSTATION 3, Nintendo Wii , iOS (including iPhone, iPod, and iPad), OSX, Linux, and Android (including NVIDIA Tegra™ devices), MMO servers running Linux and Windows; OSX ports; and Windows games, where GPU-accelerated advanced simulation is poised for continued growth.

Monster Madness - one of the fist games that utilizes PhysX SDK on Android platform

More importantly, because PhysX continues to be the choice of developers for integration into world’s leading commercial game engines, including Unreal Engine 3, Trinigy, Unity, Torque, Gamebryo, Lightspeed, Hero, and Dark Basic, not to mention other internal tech engines which also use PhysX, designers and artists know they have compelling development platforms they can immediately take advantage for making their games that much more realistic and interactive.

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NVIDIA has prepared a “surprise” – fully upgraded and rewamped Developer Zone.

Among with full set of new features and content, PhysX section was renovated too (previously, certain parts were staying without update for years).

Browsing through new website, we have found some intersting data, never revealed before – for example, APEX FAQ states that:

What APEX modules are available?

APEX 1.1 will include Turbulence and APEX 1.2 will include APEX Destruction with GPU Rigid Bodies. If you are interested in Turbulence or Destruction with GPU rigid bodies, please email us at apex-beta@nvidia.com.

APEX 1.0 Beta was released to public several weeks ago.

Several updated pages we recommend you to visit:

Main PhysX page

APEX Page

APEX FAQ

Physical simulation of character clothing is yet inceptive, but very promising trend and a great way to make game characters more believable.

We are giving an overview of most interesting cloth simulation packages in our new article : “Clothing simulation solutions for games“.

Multiplayer.it website has published hand camera footage of next-gen Samaritan Demo, showcased behind closed doors by Epic Games few days ago. Previously, only screenshots were revealed to public.

Update: cam video replaced with official one

This demo relies heavily on DX11 technology, and also utilizes APEX Clothing and APEX Destruction modules at certain degree. One may say, that physics effects fit organically into the demo composition, but we’ll say they are almost unnoticable, unfortunately.

But in general, demo looks great.

As good tradition, several interesting physical demos were presented during GTC Day 1 Keynote by Tony Tamasi, Senior Vice President Content and Technology in NVIDIA.

First one was showing some high-fidelity smoke simulation, with particles interacting fully with characters, producing nice fluid and turbulent behaviour.

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KitGuru website has brought us news that Manju Hedge, former CUDA and PhysX Solutions Vice President (previously – CEO and co-founder of Ageia) has left NVIDIA to join AMD.

Our own sources at NVIDIA are indicating  – this information is truthful.

However, according to our data, Manju departure won’t affect PhysX (he hasn’t been working on PhysX for over a year) or CUDA development process in NVIDIA, and his new roll in AMD won’t be connected to game physics related projects (instead, Manju is going to be involved in ISV recruitment).

Update: Pursuant to latest press-release, Manju Hedge will lead AMD Fusion Experience Program.

Update #2: from X-bit Labs article

In particular, [Manju Hedge] will manage the developer relations teams that help independent software developers (ISVs) to implement program code optimized for heterogeneous multi-core microprocessors.

We want to thanks Manju Hedge for awesome work on PhysX front and wish him best of luck with this new assignment !

Interesting research project, called pCubee – five-paneled LCD cube that gives users the appearance that virtual objects are inside and product of two years of work by students at the University of British Columbia – has drawn our attention recently. Why ? Because software part of pCubee is based on Open Scene Graph and PhysX SDK.

As you may see, pCubee can handle not only simple rigid bodies collisions, but also more complicated objects, like softbodies (1:20 – 1:27) and particle systems.

Gonna be interesting to see if this project will evolve from concept to something more consistent, like game console or other consumer entertainment product.