Nvidia demonstrated in this year’s GDC the latest version of their PhysX SDK. The new PhysX SDK comes with some impressive fur rendering support, as the company showcased a bear that contained 840.000 particles simulated as 100.000 invidual strands of fur. Those strands of fur could be interacted in real-time and the end result was close enough to Pixar’s CG movies. That was really great but nothing had prepared for what was about to follow.
Nvidia had also showcased the new rigid body solver that is supported by the latest version of PhysX. Thanks to this new set of tools, players will be able to completely destroy their environments. According to the company, real time fracture was possible thanks to the incredible raw power of modern-day GPUs. In case you were unaware of, in current games designers set specific points at where objects can be broken. This can be easily noticed in Crysis, where palm trees can be broken at certain points. With Nvidia’s PhysX, players will be able to break things and cause fracture where they want to, without any limitation.
Nvidia went ahead then and fired up a demo map from Unreal Engine 3, that supported this new fracture set. And quite frankly, there are no words to describe what we were watching on screen. The level of destruction is miles ahead of anything we’ve seen so far. In fact, even Crysis and Battlefield 3 felt quite limited after watching Nvidia’s tech demo. To put it simple: this is the future of destructible environments.
Finally, Nvidia revealed that this new PhysX SDK will be fully supported by both Unreal Engine 3 and the newly announced, Unreal Engine 4.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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