Switchball has a special place in a history of hardware PhysX acceleration, as it was one of the first games with support for Ageia PhysX cards (Switchball demo was included on a CD with PPUs, although the game itself was released later one, in 2007).

Following video, showcasing the physics of Switchball in action, was prepared by our fellow reader Andrew “MohawkADE” Elliott.

Being a physics based puzzle-platfromer title, Switchball was offering special puzzles using SPH fluid dynamics and cloth simulation exclusive for Ageia PPU owners (if PPU was not found in the system, such sequences were substituted with less advanced versions).

Hawken is a promising online mech-based combat game, under development by indie company Adhesive Games. This upcoming title has already garnered enough fans among players, thanks to excellent level design and gorgeous visuals.

Recently, Hawken trailer, featuring additional physically simulated particle effects, was demonstrated during Jen-Hsun Huang Keynote at NVIDIA Gaming Festival (NGF 2012).

Later on, PhysX support was confirmed by Jason Hughes, producer at Adhesive Games.

According to our sources, game will not only include PhysX particle effects, but also have destructible environments.

Update: several screenshots were captured by Game Watch website.

Hawken is slated to be released at 12.12.2012.

Following trailer, showcasing hardware accelerated PhysX effects in upcoming Borderlands 2 title from Gearbox Software, was recorded on camera by one of the participants of Nvidia GeForce GTX Meet-Up event, which was held in San Francisco on March 28.

Update: alternative version

Now you can see all previosly mentioned effects – physical particles, tearable cloth and dynamic fluids – in action.

Some interesting technology prototypes, that might greathly enhance Eve Online visual look in the future, were demonstrated today during “CCP Presents” keynote at Fanfest 2012 event by Tony Tamassi, Senior Vice President of Content & Technology in NVIDIA.

Update: video available

Update #2: devblog from CCP & article from NVIDIA

First one – DX 11 support and tesselation. In a real-time demo scene (running on a GTX 560, btw – “most commonly used card in EvE” as Tony stated), tesselation was used to enhance relatively simple model of Revenant Sansha Carrier with incredible number of smaller details (all the spurs, cables and stuff – being real geometry, not plain normal maps), all properly lightened and casting real shadows.

Second – additionally physically simulated objects in the space. In the same demo, while fairing through massive asteroid field, carrier was colliding with smaller asteroids and debris, flying all other the field, crashing and fracturing them upon impact. All simulation was done through PhysX SDK.

We remind you that currently PhysX/APEX is already used to sumulate clothing and hair on characters in EvE Online.

And finally, innovative offer was presented – capsuleers will have an option to buy NVIDIA GPUs.. for PLEX. GTX 560 was priced at 20 PLEX (however, offer might be limited to this model only).

It is now official – Borderlands 2 will be the next game to support GPU accelerated PhysX effects.

Update: GPU PhysX trailer was caught on camera

At GeForce Kepler Editor’s Day (event, during which Kepler GPUs were presented to press), Borderlands 2 demo featuring GPU PhysX effects was demonstrated by Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Founder and CEO, running on a GeForce GTX 680 GPU.

Hardware accelerated content will include:

• Fully simulated tearable cloth which interacts with weapons, forces, weather, etc
• Persistent GPU simulated particles that interact with the world
• Fully-interactive fluids
• Maybe something more

Update: Some impressions from journalists who saw the live demo:

Gamespot:

The PC version of Gearbox Software’s upcoming Borderlands 2 is set to support many PhysX enhancements. These include water that reacts accurately to a player’s movements, rippling and splashing around the environment as you walk through it.

Borderlands 2 also makes use of PhysX to render destruction. For example, fire a rocket launcher into the ground, and huge chunks of earth and gravel fly into the air. The resulting debris settles on the floor, where you can kick it around by walking through it.

Eurogamer:

At NVIDIA’s press event we were treated to a demo of Borderlands 2 with PhysX enhancements including some impressive water simulation, enhanced (destructible!) cloth physics and volumetric smoke trails from rockets, which animated beautifully.

Destructoid:

At NVIDIA’s Editor’s Day, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford showed off Borderlands 2 and how it implemented PhysX. Fluids pooled and flowed in complete real-time, and even reacted to explosions — splashing about into numerous smaller puddles.

Cloth materials reacted accordingly to foreign objects, and could even be torn and shredded when fired at.

It was quite incredible how these effects could be handled with such relative ease in real-time, when just five years ago it took me several hours to render them for 3D animations on a high-end PC.

We hope that Gearbox will provide more detailed information, including screenshots or video, soon enough.

Borderlands 2 is slated to be released in September, 2012.

QQ Dance 2 is a sequel to ultra-popular (over 2 million concurrent users, 100 million registered users) Chinese online dancing game called, obviously, QQ Dance.

Build on proprietary H3D engine, QQ Dance 2 will not only provide significant improvement in visual fidelity, but also feature fully simulated clothing and hair on characters using PhysX SDK 2.8.4 and APEX Clothing module.

Presented demo is containing 50 000 simultaneously simulated cloth vertices (for example, even most intense scene in Mafia 2 has no more than 15 000 cloth vertices).

QQ Dance 2 is supposed to be released in Q4 2012. This game will not only support GPU acceleration, but also have a CPU path for non-NVIDIA systems.

“NVIDIA and Gearbox are bringing something really special to PDXLAN 19.

Attendees are in for an exclusive treat that will blow your mind!!”

These welcome words can be found on official page of upcoming PDXLAN event.

Rumors are saying, that NVIDIA will demonstrate special PhysX demo of a game from Gearbox Software, running on next-gen “Kepler” GPU.

UPDATE [19.02.2012]: NVIDIA presentation was held on Saturday (18 Feb), at 5 pm.

According to some people, who was participating in the event – NVIDIA was not showing Kepler GPUs.

Intead, there were Tegra 3 presentation, giveaway contests (with T-shirts and even Transformer Prime tablets) and Borderlands 2 demo. But, unfortunately, “no word on PhysX“  support in Borderlands.

After year of silence, OpenC1 project (previously known as OpenCarmageddon) – fan-made remake of classic Carmageddon racing game -  returns in a form of new and stable version 1.4.

OpenC1 utilizes XNA for graphics and PhysX SDK as physics engine. It implements almost all features of the original game (vehicles, tracks, vehicle damage and car deformations, pedestrians, AI and opponents, checkpoints, UI, etc) and can use data files (car models, levels, textures, sounds) from Carmageddon title and Splatpack add-on.

In comparison to 1.3.1 version, usability has been improved greatly – OpenC1 can now automatically download free content from Camageddon and Splatpack demos, it also includes data management functionality and is far more stable.

All you need is to download archive with 1.4 version from OpenC1 project page or our server (virustotal report), extract it, install latest PhysX System Software, XNA Framework 3.0 and run the OpenC1.exe file.

Today we have stumbled upon following article (and related post), that is promising huge framerate boost in Batman: Arkham City with GPU PhysX effects enabled by replacing certain APEX .dll file with same .dll, but from Mafia II title (which is also featuring APEX based GPU PhysX effects). We decided to perform a little research on this effect:

Author of this method is suggesting to replace original file APEX_Clothing_x86.dll, located in Batman: AC folder, with renamed APEX Clothing.dll from Mafia II installation. Both those libraries are used by APEX Clothing module (and are responcible for cloth and clothing simulation), but have different version – Batman’s .dll is related to APEX 1.1 and the one from Mafia II – APEX 1.0.

Thus, with APEX 1.0 library cloth assets in Batman are not recognized and not simulated – they are simply appearing on level in frozen state, hovering above the ground (like carpets and posters on a screenshot below).

Disabled cloth simulation is giving you desired fps boost, but you can achieve same effect by setting “Hardware Accelerated PhysX” option to “Normal” – this will switch off all cloth and clothing simulation, leaving only particle PhysX effects, without necessity to mess up the .dlls.

To measure the effect on performance, we have tested the game using various combination of .dlls and PhysX settings (High in-game settings, DX 9).

As we expected, there is almost no difference in framerate between “tweaked” .dlls on “High PhysX” settings and original .dlls on “Normal PhysX” settings, since effect is similar – disabled cloth simulation.

Nothing like “magic tweak that increases fps by using files from older game, because new one is hobbled by purpose” as one may expect.

Sum – Pros:

• Performace boost.
• PhysX cloth objects are not removed completely, as on “Normal” PhysX settings.

Sum – Cons:

• Frozen PhysX cloth objects without proper physical interaction may look out of place.
• Older APEX .dll may decrease game stability and disable cloth simulation, that is not part of GPU PhysX effects.
• Same effect can be achieved by switching PhysX option to “Normal”, without any potential negative backwash.

We have added a set of comparison PhysX screenshots for Batman: Arkham City, which in pair with previously released comparison video are completing our GPU PhysX Profile for this title.

You can view comparison screenhots, video and additional info at Batman: Arkham City – GPU PhysX Profile page .