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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rqle - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
I don’t see anything "special" yet. I wouldn’t mind settling for a “simulated” cloth or explosion effect either with less performance loss. Comparing the kind of “simulated” effects company like valve and others have achieved, even if it’s not technically accurate, this small physics thing looks pretty weak.If physics is going to improve our games, it got to immense us in ways regular “simulated” explosion or particle couldn’t achieve and without the performance hit.
mmntech - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
So far, all I'm seeing for PhysX is just a few small enhanced visuals but it really doesn't contribute much to gameplay, which is where it really counts.morose - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
So by that reasoning, Mirror's Edge would be just as compelling if it used half the number of polygon's to render stuff and looked all blocky, right? I mean, graphics don't contribute to gameplay either after a certain point except to make things look nicer/more immersive.My point is simply just because your gameplay doesn't hinge on physics like Portal doesn't mean that physics aren't important visually. Stuff that *looks* OMG awesome is fun too. Do we need dedicated physics to do it? I dunno. I do remember playing Half-Life in completely software rendered mode and thinking it was just as fun as the accelerated version (except for missing the cool transparency effects in some textures). But when was the last time a 3D game came with THAT option? :)
SuperGee - Monday, December 15, 2008 - link
Graphics attracts gamers interest.Graphics feeds marketing.
Graphics can enhance emersion.
Graphics load aslo sets your target audience.
Graphics is gameplay independand.
Graphics compete with gameplay.
PhysX uses shaders so the render module sees less shaders.
So less geo vertext pixel stuf can eb done. But TMU Rop stuf have the full GPU resources still avaible. Game can be Fillrate or more shader dependant. Wich means a fillrate heavy game like UT3 you must put the GFX setting extreem to make a G92 dive to CPU physX performance. A shader heavy Game GTX260 could get overstress by both loads.
Then what GPU. GT200 halve of it shader is almost a G80 and the other halve to, but minus 8 shaders each. Similar to a a bunch of PPU. six or so.
But wenn you take a 8600GT or 9800GTX+ you have a lot les. But PhysX could use 16 to 32 shader to have same or more power then a PPU.
For a shader effect hit.
So if you want G92B Rendering power thus a 9800GTX+ Wich nice.
But don't want to deliver much in on PhysX for the more heavy physX games. A GTX260 would be a better choice.
Morroredge PhysX recomendation is a 9800GTX.
So with 8600GT. Even the nV demo's run choppy fullscreen, unles in poststamp window size they run smooth.
My 4400+ 2GB 8600GT + PPU would be replaced by.
Ci7 920 6GB GTX280 55nm next year.
PhysX doesn't come for free. It uses the same GPU resources as Shader effects. Unified shaders.
So now waiting for the killer physX game. Wich this is not.
Thorburn - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
To make the physics essential to gameplay they have to be present on every system you play on.Few developers are going to write a game title that can only be run playablely on NVIDIAs DX10 hardware - and considering PhysX processing takes resources from graphics shader processing they'd have to be fairly high-end ones at that - it would be commercial suicide.
Tigerlight - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
Indeed, I still see no compelling reason to be excited by hardware physics yet. There is NOTHING being done in ANY title to date that cannot be done by software just as effectively.DerekWilson - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
In case it wasn't really clear, the physics simulations actually are able to run no matter what hardware you have -- they will run on an all AMD system if that's what you have. The only difference is performance.While we haven't seen the game or benchmarked anything yet, it looks like some of the preliminary data NVIDIA is sharing with us indicates that with a 3.2 GHz i7 and a 1GB Radeon HD 4870, you could see playable frame rates with all the PhysX options enabled. Of course, they aren't going to go benchmarking the entire lineup of AMD hardware for us, so we really don't know what else may or may not be playable.
But the bottom line is that NVIDIA shows off very large performance advantages (in early beta code) when running with the physics turned on. That's their advantage here rather than feature limitations.
Which is good and what I was trying to talk about near the end of the blog post. Sorry if I was ambiguous.
Oyster - Monday, December 8, 2008 - link
This is real humorous: the cloth effects missing altogether when PhysX is disabled - what's to stop nVIDIA from manipulating the game physics in order to sell more PhysX [physical] cards? I mean we've all seen what games like Half Life 2, Fry Cry 2, Fallout 3 etc. can do without PhysX - this simply seems to be staged so that nVIDIA can sell more hardware.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
I agree also. I just posted comments that brought up the same issue.Spivonious - Tuesday, December 9, 2008 - link
Totally agree. The Source engine already does this (very successfully IMO) with the Havok physics engine. What makes PhysX better, aside from hardware acceleration?