Real-time simulation and rendering of realistic hair/fur, consisting of multiple strands, is gettng much attention these days – one can easily name a TressFX solution, developed by AMD.

A competitive response from NVIDIA, new hair and fur simulation technology, which is now officially called NVIDIA HairWorks, was firstly showcased at The Witcher 3 presentation half a year ago and recently used in an actual game title – Call of Duty: Ghosts – to provide “Dynamic Fur” simulation for animal characters.

In comparison to other GPU accelerated physics features, Dynamic Fur was implemented through DirectCompute, which opens it for AMD users as well.

Tae-Yong Kim, physics programmer at NVIDIA, has agreed to answer some of our questions about HairWorks solution in general, and Call of Duty: Ghosts integration in particular.

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A Beta version of the Catzilla benchmark, developed by Plastic Demo in collaboration with Polish post production company, Platige, is now available for download.

Catzilla is a cross-API (OpenGL 4.0 and DirectX 9/11) benchmark designed the Windows platform, and is also featuring a parallel graphics engine that can take advantage of multi-core CPUs.

Benchmark consists of the main demoscene-style dubstep-heavy giant cat fight scene, which stresses both CPU and GPU, and a set of smaller benchmarks – CPU rigid body physics, GPU smoke simulation, fur rendering, etc.

As interesting note, Catzilla uses PhysX SDK 3.2 as physics engine, however, it is running purely on CPU (as confirmed by one of the developers).

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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.

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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).

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.

NVIDIA and Epic Games are teaming up this week at Game Developers Conference to showcase latest additions to Unreal Engine 3, like DX 11 support and NVIDIA APEX Framework integration.

“Thanks to NVIDIA’s excellent cross-platform physics technologies and DX11 expertise, we have enhanced Unreal Engine 3 to bring unprecedented new levels of realism and demonstrate what the next generation of gaming will be,” said Mark Rein, vice president of Epic Games.

Alpha and beta versions of certain APEX modules were used in UE3 based games previously (Dark Void and Batman Arkham Asylum), but now full APEX toolset will be available to all UE3 licensees and UDK users as well, and can be used to create high-fidelity physics content (character clothing, for example) even in CPU PhysX and console games.

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Hardware website PCPOP.COM has published an overview article about various GPU technologies and features, like 3D Vision, Stream, Eyefinity, OpenCL, etc. Article itself isn’t valuable much unless you know Chinese, but it has interesting poll included, with question “In addition to gaming performance,  which technologies are you interested in ?” and decent number of votes already.

Users put features like low noise and power consumption  (功耗、发热、噪音、节能) in the first place, DX11 support goes second, hardware accelerated PhysX on third place, Anti-aliasing (抗锯齿技术) comes fourth.