Gamespot is reporting EA and Take-Two are adopting Nvidia's PhysX technology. The article states the rival companies have revealed plans to utilize the physics engine in PC titles.
The goal of Nvidia's technology--based on the laws of physics--is to make game objects respond in a realistic way to physical events. More conventional technology uses a canned response, in which the same motion is repeated over and over. For example, a window breaks or a person falls the same way every time. In a PhysX-enabled football sports game, however, the angle and velocity of the impact is calculated by the GPU to generate a real-time response that is different every time
Now you may be asking yourself, well what's the big deal? You may not even play PC games. Well the article goes on to say:
Ageia's secret sauce is its physics libraries, which are supported on Microsoft's Xbox 360, Sony's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii, as well as on the CPU and Ageia's own PPU (physics processing unit), Ujesh Desai, vice president of product marketing at Nvidia, said in an interview last week. "It's a very open platform. Something game developers really liked, which is why a lot of game developers adopted it," he said
It's hard for me to believe these two publishers, especially EA, would not utilize this on titles released on the three consoles . I think it's safe to assume we could see this technology in their sports titles as well. One title coming out in the near future that will feature PhysX is Backbreaker.
The game Backbreaker uses PhysX. "They're calculating those tackles in real time, based on how the body interacts and the body mechanics interact. So no two tackles are the same," according to Desai. Another game, Mirror's Edge, is coming out for the PC in January from EA's Swedish studio DICE.
Of course at this point this is all speculation. We may never see this on console this generation and if we do it may not be used in sports games. It's hard to imagine we won't though when you consider both companies are going to have this physics engine in their gaming development.
