Mirror's Edge PhysX Side-by-Side Video
by Derek Wilson on December 8, 2008 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Dell
A little while back, NVIDIA brought us the news that Mirror's Edge for the PC would feature PhysX support and include some neat effects physics. Effects physics, as you may recall, is the physical simulation of things that don't impact gameplay but simply enhance the visual impact of a game. This can range from particle systems to persistent debris enhanced destructibility or more accurate simulation of fluids, smoke or other volumetric effects. The impact is in immersiveness but it doesn't bring game changing aspects of hardware accelerated physics to the table quite yet.
And we haven't seen anything, until Mirror's Edge, that looked promising in terms of adding anything really compelling to a game. The previous video we posted showed some nice potential, but we still haven't gotten the opportunity to play with it ourselves and really feel the difference. We requested a side-by-side video hoping to get a better handle on what, exactly, is improved in Mirror's Edge. NVIDIA delivered.
Here's the original video of Mirror's Edge we posted.
Here is the side by side video showing better what DICE has added to Mirror's Edge for the PC with PhysX. Please note that the makers of the video (not us) slowed down the game during some effects to better show them off. The slow downs are not performance related issues. Also, the video is best viewed in full screen mode (the button in the bottom right corner).
The effects in there can be simulated on either a CPU or an NVIDIA GPU. The advantage to the GPU is performance and NVIDIA indicates that even an Intel Core i7 processor will have a tough time without GPU support. So these effects aren't anything we've never seen before, but it certainly looks like there is just a lot more of it in Mirror's Edge (and not in that really bad too many particles/too much debris sort of way). The glass breaking itself honestly looks the same (or close enough) to us, but the persistent particles are where it's at. Having a little debris stick around and be affected by the character is a nice touch. The cloth, plastic and tarp effects are what look like the real icing on the cake in the game though. The complete absence of the cloth objects when physics is disabled makes an already sparse looking world look pretty empty by comparison.
We still want to really get our hands on the game to see if it feels worth it, but from this video, we can at least say that there is more positive visual impact in Mirror's Edge than any major title that has used PhysX to date. NVIDIA is really trying to get developers to build something compelling out of PhysX, and Mirror's Edge has potential. We are anxious to see if the follow through is there.
Extending this story is the fact that today NVIDIA is announcing that EA and 2K games have both licensed PhysX and will be working with NVIDIA to include the technology in future titles they publish. All EA and 2K development studios will now have license to develop with PhysX for all platforms. This means Mirror's Edge may not be the only EA title going forward to get the PhysX treatment, and 2K will bring PhysX to the table with Borderlands (which is being developed by Gearbox).
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shin0bi272 - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - link
what makes it better is that its real world(or more realistic) physics. What youve been getting with 99% of games up till now is scripted physics on almost everything and ragdoll physics on 2 or 3 objects at a time on the screen. If you run the nvidia fluid demo that is part of the nvidia physx pack (1 or 2 doesnt matter), you can change the mode of display and see that what the physx is really rendering is a bunch of tiny little spheres that have adhesion to each other at different levels of stickiness. Thats also why there is some slowdown when a lot of particles and physx actions are taking place... its rendering hundreds or even tens of thousands of little spheres and masking them with a texture to make it look like cloth, metal, meat, or liquid.When you interact with scripted physics objects in most games (like say a door in left 4 dead) it reacts the exact same way every time no matter where you shoot it. If those doors were physx based the hole from the bullets would appear exactly where you shot the door. As you also saw in the above videos when the helicopter is shooting the window out it also moves the blinds when it hits the blinds and not just the window no matter what happens.
Basically physx is the next generation of game interaction and it doesnt hurt that ageia (the company that nvidia bought physx from) was giving out their engine for free.
Lastly did anyone of you play gears of war or unreal tournament 3? those were based on ageia physx.
GaryJohnson - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
All those 'physX' effects can be run without the dedicated hardware. So the question is: what's the framerate difference between dedicated hardware and software emulation?SuperGee - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
I see it this way. If Chips performe like this.Some Qxxxx from iNtel has 50GFlops.
GT200 has 933Gflops
while a 4870X2 has 2,4Tera flops. Maybe with OpenCL SDK rework it could do PhysX to.
And you can have more of those. Up to 4 GPU's.
Where a CPU is never dedicated!!!! Also that Cell CPU
It's about the PhysX load.
1/10 of GTX200 is like a Dual Qxxxx dedicated for physics.
If PPU is like 100GFLops dedicated it stil beats non dedicated Ci7
But takes 1/5 of a gTX280 to do comparable. Leaves 4/5 for rendering like a GTX260
5 gflops Gravity, Collisions, Ragdol, gravity gun.
50 Gflops above but with Cloths and fluids
100 Gflops as above but all object can be destructable.
200 Full basic destructable enviorment
2,4TFlop Full fine detaild destructable enviorment.
20Teraflop All PhysX features in one game posible with decent fine detail and game wide used.
Means
So games take a default mix and a enhanced mix of PhysX features depending on the target platform depends how fine detaild and how wide within the game they can use it.
So what nV PhysX means. You can optional have a lot more Physics in the game.
If you don't like a PhysX feature or it subtile it doesn't mean it not computational intensive. Like Dust its subtile its effect Physics. How much resources does it cost. Can it be scraped to enhance a other. Like make trees finer breakable feature. like a more valueble feature.
The cloths physics represents blokking tearable object. Wich is a nice touch. The hanging flags are overkill. More distracts.
A good example of PhysX is Ageia island map. knowing that it can be even better with more powerfull GPU also those in the future.
Performance CPU vs PPU vs GPU is tested with UT3 PhysX maps.
Well Mirror edge will be benched to I think in the future.
Spivonious - Friday, December 12, 2008 - link
Play HL2? It had tons of non-scripted physics (imo scripted physics aren't physics at all). All done in software, very smoothly.shin0bi272 - Sunday, December 14, 2008 - link
well yes and no. objects like barrels and paint cans that you can pick up with your gravity gun and shoot had ragdoll physics (the pride of havok). Those are all that had physics though ... things like the falling smoke stack when you were driving the airboat were scripted physics.raskren - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
Does the actual physical PhysX card still exist anymore? Since Nvidia has purchased that company have they decided to move all physics processing to the GPU, rather than offload to an external interface?shin0bi272 - Wednesday, December 10, 2008 - link
yes they do but they are a pci (NOT pci express) and after testing with my 8800gtx physx enabled vs the hardware card... the 8800gtx puts out twice as many particles at the same framerate as the addin card. In warmonger you get a max of 20-30 fps with the addin card, which is much better than the 0-3 youd get without any physx, but its a far cry from what you get with the vid card version. They updated warmonger to version 2.5 and it runs much smoother than it used to.poco153 - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
It seems like the frame rate tanks pretty hard on the PhysX video when there are lots of glass shards. I wonder how noticeable that is while playing, or if it is just an anomaly.VaultDweller - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
There's text at the bottom of the video stating that the slowdown was done in post-production.I don't know whether the videos posted here are high-resolution enough for the text to be legible, I'm at work and can't view them right now.
glynor - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
It IS being intentionally slowed down. There is actually a subtitle in the video that states this, but it is impossible to read unless you watch the HD version.Screen cap here: http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/6201/capture2ex...">http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/6201/capture2ex...