NVIDIA® PhysX® technology continues to be the platform of choice for interactive entertainment. NVIDIA is making a number of new announcements on PhysX-enabled games and has been conducting developer roundtables with members of the press so they have a chance to discuss PhysX implementation with the developers directly.

The following interview is one of many developer roundtables to come, with each one highlighting a specific upcoming game.


Since you acquired Aegia, what are some of the new things you’re doing that can be done on the GPU?

Ujesh (NVIDIA): I would say Turbulence, one of our new modules for NVIDIA Apex is a good example of something you can do with the processing power of the GPU. If you go to the NVIDIA channel on Youtube, you can see a Turbulence “playable” car demo. We’re packaging it up now and we’re going to release it as one of the Power Packs that we make available for free so you guys can see it and play with it. But the idea is that you get to drag this car around and you get real-time interactive smoke. And it’s very cool. So when Morgan is talking about Turbulence, he’s talking about the smoke that we showed in the GDC demo, but now you are applying it to the jet pack, you’re applying it to the space ships and the Dark Void game they’re talking about. And it’s just going to bring a whole new sense of realism to the game and because the jet pack is such an integral part of the game, it’s just going to make it totally awesome.

How big are the levels? How far can a player go before getting off-track?

Christian (Airtight Studios): So the scope and scale of the levels is they’re pretty massive. We’re making heavy use of streaming and we’ve constructed the Void, which is the location of the game basically as as an alien dimension. It has large formation rocks free-floating in the air, very alien, non-realistic geo forms and terraforms. So we’ve created a fictitious place for us to have a lot of fun. To that end, we have big open air areas, tight interiors, you stream in and out. So there’s no easy answer to say how big it is. One of the things that quickly becomes apparent when you play Dark Void is that the sense of scale is pretty massive. You’re flying around and you realize the minute you land, that thing that you were fighting was on a huge scale three miles away and now you’re at its foot and it’s now towering over you, like a Gargantuan. Screenshots will help, but in terms of how do players not get lost, which may be at the heart of your question, again we give you the jet pack, that’s freedom; we give you weapons, that’s freedom. We make the game goals very clear. You always know where you need to be and what you need to do. If I can be so bold, I think the level design choices in terms of lighting and placement and the tempo of pacing of our missions are always pushing you forward. What we’re trying to make is basically an action romp. So we’re trying to take as much of the thinking out of the game to get right into the visceral action. So we’re doing a pretty good job of making sure you always know where you need to go.

Is there anything in the way that PhysX actually changes the way in which you play the game or will it just be eye candy?

Morgan (Airtight Studios): If you’re familiar with dog fighting games or aerial combat games one of the major sensations is 3D positional spatial awareness. Ultimately we’re talking about a game that’s sharing a base level of content across two console platforms and the PC. The visual enhancements, although outstanding eye candy, they are going to be hot. It will definitely make the game prettier and when we talk about Turbulence and its integration into the smoke trails we’re also talking about changing the nature of the combat space in the air environment. So you’re getting obscured enemies, you’re losing sight of certain enemies by pulling certain maneuvers and then you have to fly through the smoke to expose them. We’re upping the ante of the ‘reality’ of our jet pack and dog fighting scenarios and I think it not only changes the visual level but will change it on a tactical level in how you’ll fly and how you’ll basically hunt down somebody else in space.

Doesn’t Capcom have its own custom-made Cinematics engine? It doesn’t use PhysX. So from a technical point-of-view, what are the advantages of using the PhysX engine instead of using your own?

Christian: Let me take a stab at that one. You’re referring to Capcom’s MT framework engine, which is our internal engine created in Osaka by our tech team there. It’s been used in pretty much every game that’s come out of Osaka. You rightly point out that they use Havoc in their engine. One of the differences between the MT framework engine and Unreal Engine 3, is that UE3 comes with PhysX environment as a part of its core and we had started Dark Void from the get-go as a PhysX project. In addition to that, one of AirTight’s founders is the former head of Microsoft’s game studios, so there was a preexisting relationship between AirTight and some of the Aegia guys. So we were predisposed to go PhysX on that project from the very beginning.

From an innovation standpoint in developing the game, we have found that the combination of PhysX and UE3 has been as easy as anything in video games can be easy, which means everything is hard, but this makes it a big step versus coming up with new solutions. Integrating in with SpeedTree, which we also use was a big plus. The nature of our relationship with NVIDIA and Aegia has been such that the communication on problem areas we’ve run into has been fast. And so the support side has been a huge advantage. It’s often overlooked at how knowing a guy’s personal cell phone number can help out and how quickly they can work through a difficult situation for you.

In terms of its use in Dark Void, we’re using it in aspects of destructibility, particle effects and even to some degree we’re looking at integrations in some of the animation systems. So it has been a pretty big boon.

In terms of why X over the other, as Christian said, it was the best call when we started down this road quite some time ago and we’ve been happy with that decision throughout the duration of the project.

Will there be breakable environments and objects implemented with PhysX?

Christian: Yes, but we’re also scaling it exactly to our integration right now in the process of polishing up the game. So we’re still fine-tuning the exact extent of destructibility. I just don’t want anybody to walk away saying Dark Void is all about massive destructibility or about awesome jet packs. So we’re scaling that integration appropriately.

Will the PhysX effect still be accessible on non-NVIDIA systems and software and what will the performance hit be?

Morgan: So right now when we talk about the PhysX effects, we’re talking of upgrading the experience with the new weapons and Turbulence. We are targeting a hardware solution using the GPUs, which is sort of the benefit and the power of collaborating with NVIDIA. We’re not looking at doing software emulation for any of this.

Our regular PhysX integration that you’re going to see across the totality of the platforms we’re releasing on will obviously work on whatever video card that hits our minimum spec.

Will there be more projects from Capcom that do PhysX integrations?

Christian: We’ll look at projects on a case-by-case basis and make that determination on appropriateness for the title, and availability of resources on our side to handle the integration.

Unreal Tournament wasn’t particularly demanding. How will Dark Void stress the GPU?

Morgan: In terms of our game play environment, the thing to remember is we’re raging the battle on the ground and the air simultaneously. There is a lot more actions happening around the player than you’d get in your typical match of UT, especially considering that when we talk air with its open skies, your horizon line is far; you see much more action simultaneously than you do in your typical room to hallway to even open air. So I think we’ll be throwing more at the screen. Will we stress-out the GPU like a GeForce 260? I’d like to try! I’d like to push the hardware as much to the limit as possible for the best results. To that end, pushing hardware for hardware’s sake is no good--it’s got to enhance the experience. It can’t just be gratuitous, but I think the things we’re talking about and the type of game we’re making in Dark Void, there’s a huge opportunity here for us is to up the level of presentation. We didn’t start this project thinking that the goal is to beat UT, but we’re going to do our best!

Is there a chance for a built-in benchmark which could get the game tons of press?

Christian: The thought had occurred to us. I don’t know if I’m willing to say yes right now, but the conversations are ongoing and we hope to, but I just don’t want to say yes right now. We do think that a benchmark of PhysX acceleration versus non-PhysX would be an interesting thing for people to have at their disposal and we think we’d be a great game to actually show some of that off.

How do you load balance between PhysX and graphics using the cores in the GPU?

I’m afraid that’s getting more technical than I’m familiar with, so I don’t want to just blow smoke. It seems like you want a technical answer; I’d like to get you one. So if the guys at Nvidia can shoot me an e-mail on that one, I’d love to get back to you.

Can you talk about SLI PhysX?

Ujesh: Sure. One of the other benefits that we’ve talked to you guys about, but I don’t know that it is internalized or one we’ve pushed it hard is that the other benefit you get from a GeForce card is that it has a built-in PhysX processor. So say you bought a 9800 GT and down the road you actually want to upgrade when we come out with our next generation card. Well nowadays most motherboards or at least most of the gamers that buy their motherboards buy it with two graphics slots in it. So instead of having to throw away that 9800 GT, you can actually take it and move it over one slot and through our control panel you can actually make that card a dedicated PhysX processor. So that’s another cool feature that we’re offering gamers and it’s something that we’re working with developers on to also take advantage of it so you can have cool scalable PhysX where you can have one GPU like a GeForce GTX 260 doing your graphics rendering and you can put a 9800 GT in the second slot and have that be a dedicated PhysX processor.

So is SLI PhysX available now?

Ujesh: Yea, it is working now. You can just use any of our standard drivers, take the graphics card, go into the control panel and you can pick which graphics card you want to dedicate for PhysX and which you want to use for graphics rendering.

You guys talked about how easy it was to integrate PhysX into the games. Since you’re obviously developing Dark Void for both Xbox 360 and PS3, how hard is it to develop a PC version alongside the other two versions with all the PhysX effects?

Christian: It’s interesting to note that even though we’re multi-platform, one of the main development environments for the team is on the PC. So we actually do most of the workflow iteration and integration in the PC version, on the PC environment. So in some ways you could consider that a developmental main SKU. I don’t want that to be misconstrued with what we consider to be a release main SKU because we put importance in all of them, but it’s been a very PC dev environment on our builds. To that end the integration of the PhysX, it was...I don’t want to say “Yea, it was totally easy!” It was actually hard. It took some work and the support that we got made it go down smooth and now it’s part of our code base moving forward. I don’t know how better to describe it than that. The integration had its hiccups like any integration of tech into a game. Those were sorted through. It’s one of those things that now you forget about any of the hiccups. So I’ve got to say the guys at Nvidia have always been super supportive and collaborative. I mean people always say “Yes, the partnership worked really great.” I mean quite literally that a cell phone call has produced remarkable support at our point instantaneously at odd hours of the day. It’s been a privilege. It feels like a large dev team basically.

Just a follow-up question since we have the Capcom guys here. A lot of PC gamers are waiting to hear about release dates for upcoming PC ports for games, specifically Street Fighter 4 and Bionic Commando and Dark Void. Any chance you can give us some color on that?

Christian: I’m very happy you asked. Actually as we speak right now Morgan and I are sitting in my hotel room in Monte Carlo at what our Captivate Global Media Summit Event. We’ve announced actually to the media what those dates are. They will be made clear next week when the embargo lifts, also on the 28th.

Will we also get any color on whether or not there will be a Resident Evil 5 PC port at that date?

Christian: We’ll talk about it next week.

Is there going to be a demo or beta of Dark Void available?

Morgan: Unfortunately we’re still a little too early in development for that right now.

Is there a PC demo in the plans somewhere?

Morgan: There is. No commitments on our dates. We’re pretty big believers that Dark Void is best grocked when seeing it in motion. So we feel for any game a demo is important, especially in these days of savvy consumers. For us to have people ‘get’ what our game is, we feel a demo is crucial. So without any commitments we feel that it’s in our best interest for the product to make sure people can check it out and not just rely on a review or the back of a box. But again, the title is shipping much later this year and it will be close to release when that demo is available.

Will you have a public PC demo as well?

Our intention is to have demos across all platforms, so yes.

How about DRM on the PC version?

Christian: Another good question. I dare say the answer is inevitable. The question is what form is it? And there are some things evolving within the DRM world that most people aren’t aware of yet, so I don’t want to say what that approach is going to be right now.

Morgan: It’s also worth noting that as we look at partnerships in terms of e-distribution where obviously different organizations have different ways that they handle their DRM on their side as well. And as Christian says, there’s more news to come.

Nvidia launched Apex at GDC. Was Apex used by Capcom in the Dark Void game? Can Nvidia PhysX, Apex and MT framework be used simultaneously in the game?

Morgan: So as we talk about our use of Apex or we talk about these advanced effects we’re bringing in, Turbulence specifically goes straight to the use of Apex moving forward on Dark Void. Whether or not the Apex and MT framework can work simultaneously in a game, I really can’t speak to why that would not happen, but I’m not technically familiar with the MT framework on that level.

Christian: The MT framework is a very modular engine. Different components can be shuttled out or in as needed as the engine evolves. Let’s just say that the MT framework engine is one of the most modular and adaptable engines in the world. Actually, I’m going to have someone from Nvidia jump in and provide a little more color.

Keita (NVIDIA): Engines serve many purposes. Some engines are just a pure 3D graphics renderer; others are a little more robust than that with some other tools integrated into the engine like UE3 for instance. I don’t want to give away details on the secret sauce of the MT framework engine, but fundamentally PhysX as well as the Apex are kind of complimentary to anything the developers are working on. And Apex really is just a content creation and scalability tool. So there’s no reason why if a developer is using a rendering or engine solution out there, there’s no reason why they could not use Apex to design or prototype PhysX content.

Almost all good PhysX games are using UT3 tech. Do you think we’re going to see PhysX in another top engine?

Keita: PhysX actually is integrated in a bunch of major game engines. So we’re in the Unreal engine; we’re in Gamebryo; we’re in Vision; we’re in Instincts; we’re in Trinigy; we’re in Diesel; we’re in Hero; we’re also in Big World. So pretty much every major game engine in the world has PhysX integrated into it.

And also keep in mind that a lot of the key games, just like MT framework from Capcom, a lot of games of major game developers, they use their own internally developed engines. And so with Mirror’s Edge from Dice that’s also their own proprietary engine that has a PhysX implementation. So there are licensable engines, major ones that have PhysX integrated, but there’s also internally developed ones that some of you may not be aware of because it’s not something that’s licensed. But a lot of games and game engines do use PhysX.