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.

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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

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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.

Ever since the existence of Unreal Engine 4, next-generation game development platfrom from Epic Games, was revealed, one question was bothering us – will it still rely on PhysX SDK integration for physics sumulation, like UE3 and UDK?

And it seems the answer is “Yes”.

During presentation of PhysX and APEX features, that NVIDIA employee was giving to Gametrailers at GDC 2012, following words were said:

So here we are showing some of our technologies that are already incorporated in the games and game engines.

In this case all three of these demos are in Unreal Engine.. we are integrated in both Unreal 3 and upcoming Unreal 4.

NVIDIA has released APEX SDK 1.1 (Build 112), next version of NVIDIA APEX – scalable dynamics framework, oriented on complex physical simulations.

In comparison to APEX 1.0 Beta, new version includes many bugfixes, several additions to underlying framework and various new features, like ability to calculate rigid body physics on GPU.

APEX 1.1 contains only Destruction and Clothing modules, and is still based on PhysX SDK 2.8.4.6 – first version with PhysX 3 support is going to be APEX 1.2 (that is supposed to be released in a few months).

We must also note that APEX 1.1 requires corresponding authoring tools – PhysXLab 1.1 and 2.71 DCC plug-ins.

NVIDIA APEX SDK 1.1 is available for download at Developer Support Center.

If you are experiencing trouble with registration of PhysX Developer account, please refer to our registration guide.

Release Notes:

APEX DESTRUCTION 1.1

New Features

• GPU Rigid Bodies: the NxModuleDestructible has settings to enable calculation of Rigid Body physics on GPU.

Highly anticipated feature. While using same assets and same settings, GPU Rigid Bodies are showing significantly higher performance – 70 fps for 5000+ rigid body chunks on single GTX 580 vs 10 fps on Core i7 2600K.

One-way interaction with dynamic CPU actors is also supported (via transfer of momentum). GPU accelerated rigid body physics requires NVIDIA driver 270.81 or later, PhysX 2.8.4 RC6 or later and a CUDA capable GPU.

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Certainly, many of you will agree that the addition of GPU PhysX effects to PC games has a positive influence on overall gaming experience and immersion in such titles. But how difficult is to attach hardware accelerated physics effects to a game?

Today, with the help of David Schoemehl, Manager of GPU PhysX Content in NVIDIA, and Johnny Costello, Technical Artist, we will try to give you a brief “behind the scenes” view on the process of enhancing games with extra PhysX content.

PhysXInfo.com: Hi, Johnny and David. Can you please introduce yourself?

Johnny Costello: My name is Johnny Costello, I’m 29 years old and am a native to the Midwestern United States. I went to college at Savannah College of Art and Design and received my B.F.A. in game development. I have been a technical artist at NVIDIA for about two and a half years. During that time I have worked on several GPU PhysX titles such as Batman: Arkham Asylum, Batman: Arkham City, Mafia II, Dark Void, and Alice: Madness Returns.

David Schoemehl: My name is David Schoemehl, I joined AGEIA in 2006 as an applications engineer and was the project manager on Warmonger. Since the purchase of AGEIA by NVIDIA in 2008 I have led or supported several shipping GPU PhysX titles and demos including Batman: Arkham Asylum, The Samaritan Demo, Sacred 2, The Great Kulu Demo, and Alice: Madness Returns.

My current title is Manager of GPU PhysX Content and I am responsible for aligning NVIDIA’s engineers and artists to support developers on GPU PhysX engagements. I also work closely with Epic Games to ensure a solid integration of GPU PhysX/APEX features in UE3.

PhysXInfo.com: Johnny, what is your task as a PhysX technical artist?

Johnny Costello: My tasks can change a lot from day to day, but usually I’m working on a game title in some capacity. Our goal at NVIDIA is to provide the tools that developers need in order to add great GPU features to their games. So I spend much of my time working with developers to help guide them as they use our technology to create exciting content.

Depending on the structure of a particular engagement I may also work alongside the developer to create GPU PhysX content. Then there are other days where I help design and review our tools and production workflows.

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It is time to summarize what PhysX Technology has achieved in year 2011, recall the most memorable events and releases.

. GAMES

GPU physics acceleration still can not gain enough momentum – only two games with support for GPU PhysX effects were released this year, this is the lowest result since Ageia was aquired.

One may call this an agony, but NVIDIA has told us that it was “conscious decision” – time was taken to develop and improve underlaying technology (PhysX SDK, APEX, DCC tools), thus sacrificing ability to create content and  integrate it into many games.

It was promised that we will see “more GPU PhysX games next year than you did this year” and even “a lot more in 2013″.

Meanwhile, both GPU PhysX titles released this year were pretty interesting by themselves:

• Batman: Arkham City, one of the best games with hardware PhysX support.
• Alice: Madness Returns, which is a decent game too and is certanly worth more than two Darkest of Days.

PhysX SDK as physics engine is still widely adopted by developers – over 45 PC console and games were released this year, according to our database.

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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 .