If you've been one of the strange folk to already have outfitted their gaming rig with a PhysX card, you can take advantage of it in the newly released-for-free FPS game Cellfactor: Revolution.

The game is free for everyone to download and play, but those with a PhysX card will be able to play the full game unrestricted which includes a career mode.
Those without a PhysX card are limited to only two levels.

It's not the most graphically awesome game as the screen shots in the media section show, but that's not what they're trying to show off here.

It might be worth a go just to see what sort of physics applications the game can utilise in an FPS that goes beyond the scope of previous titles that professed to have great physics implementation.

Download from (880.2Mb) File Front, Fileshack, GameSpot.

Edit: AusGamers mirror promoted forum item

mirroring, will promote ASAP!

This looks pretty damn cool. They had an article on this in the April issue of PC Powerplay and your character has psi-abilities that lets you pick things up in the game world and use it as weapons against the other players as well as having standard guns/rocket launcher thingies as well. One cool thing they said was that you can do is rip away parts of the game lvl that other players are walking on. Like if some dude was going across a bridge you could use an ability to pull it down while he's on it.

There's heaps of cool s*** you can do other then that. Push and pull objects, charging up objects so they become explosive and then hurling them at other players and something like using abilities to tear in half and crush things. Could make for some fun multiplayer action. Or it could all just be gimmicky but if done well it could be awesome.

At least the PhysX cards are coming down in price a bit now. Cheapest I've seen them for now is about $270.

What slot do these cards go in?

What sort of video, cpu, ram setup do you need to make reasonable use of them?

Sounds awesome Rev... if you could rip down like brick walls and stuff that would be killer.

They use a standard PCI slot which is one of the things I've always been a little skeptical about with these cards. I'd be more inclined to wait for a PCI-E version but if they come down a bit futher in price i might just get one anyway.

Ahhh, definetely wait.

Does anyone, like, actually have one of these cards?

I think theres only a PCI version available atm, hopefully a PCI-E one is on the way.

The PhysX library is free now, even for commercial use, so that should hopefully mean more games come out that use it (and are benefitted by the hardware). The Unreal 3 engine uses it, so that should help push its profile a bit.

So theses cards arent stand alone, u use 1 of top of ur current graphics card?

The PhysX card has absolutely nothing to do with your graphics card, I'm not entirely sure why that webpage is calling it a graphics card unless the card on that page is some kind of combo card. It is hardware acceleration for physics calculations, nothing to do with graphics.

el oh el

The number of people out there with physx cards would probably be like 1-2% of pc owners... I would be very interested in seeing a figure.

Would a quad-core do the trick?

So these phsyx cards improve performance/fps?

So these phsyx cards improve performance/fps?

My understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong anyone, is that they use a standard library of physics-related functionality which they're able to "accelerate" - basically instead of your CPU doing all the hard work calculating the physics, this card does it for you (much like your GFX card does for your graphics). So you get improved performance but only on games that support it (of which I assume there are not many).

I can't see this thing taking off; it seems more likely they've developed a cool chipset that they want to get integrated into graphics cards or something and this card is just s proof of concept or something?

Here's a list of all the games that use PhysX, not many but I think whats going to make or break PhysX will be UT3. I wouldn't mind seeing something like PhysX succeed but I'd much rather Nvidia/ATI built dual core graphics cards using PhysX as the second core.

nVidia have signed a deal (I think it was nvidia anyway) with Havoc to do Havoc physics on the GPU, so I don't think you're gonna see anything between them and PhysX. So yes, you too can sacrifice the processing power of that really expensive new video card you just bought to do physics instead of the job you bought it for.

nVidia have signed a deal (I think it was nvidia anyway) with Havoc to do Havoc physics on the GPU, so I don't think you're gonna see anything between them and PhysX. So yes, you too can sacrifice the processing power of that really expensive new video card you just bought to do physics instead of the job you bought it for.

Well if they were to put physics processing on a seperate core then you're only really limited to the throughput of the PCI-E slot. I wouldn't really care if it's PhysX or Havoc or any of the others that ends up on the card because whoever scores that deal (in this case if it is havoc) then most games will more than likely use that engine in the future unless ATi was to sign a deal with the likes of PhysX or one of the others. Don't forget that AIPU's are still in development as well, most ppl i know wouldn't even have the space in their PC for 2 additional cards.

I dont get it. Physics have been built into games for a very long time now. I've never had it lag my game performance by not having a dedicated device work it out. Is there really any value in these at all?

I dont get it. Physics have been built into games for a very long time now. I've never had it lag my game performance by not having a dedicated device work it out. Is there really any value in these at all?

The idea is that with a dedicated physics card, you can do lots more physics-y things (like track particles, apply forces etc) without needing to involve either the GPU or the CPU.

While I reckon it would be cool to smash a window in a game and watch it explode into a thousand independently-tracked particles that bounced around realistically, I'm not sure there's enough work out there for physics to have its own hardware.

Trog's probably closer to the mark; if it takes off physics hardware will probably end up integrated onto motherboards or graphics cards I guess?

Two of the most impressive things PhysX can do when you have physics hardware is realtime fluid dynamics (ie, water made out of lots and lots and lots of particles so that it can flow and separate and act like real water), and really, REALLY awesome cloth simulations. PhysX can also do things like realtime deform meshes, so say you had a demolition derby type game, the body of the car could be a deformable mesh, and when it got hit by another car it'd actually dent and crumple dynamically around the actual point of impact. The hardware will also speed up all other physics calculations so long as the code is written to take advantage of the hardware, eg you can "cook" a hardware compatible version of the physics meshes and load them onto the hardware at runtime so the hardware does all the collision calculations and such.

Of course, its a bit of a catch 22, because to get all this really cool physics stuff happening, you have to actually code specifically to support the PhysX hardware, and not many people are doing that because there isn't a lot of PhysX hardware, but there won't be more people with PhysX hardware unless more games start making use of it! I dunno if the physics cards can seriously succeed, but after seeing some of the PhysX demos that come with the SDK, I hope they do.