AGEIA GDC 2006 Press Conference

FPS’s with AGEIA support

The PC version of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, due from UbiSoft in May, will also support AGEIA physics out-of-the-box. The company has four game engines that will support AGEIA, including games powered by Epic's Uneal Engine 3 and yes, that does mean that when Unreal Tournament 2007 ships, it will have AGEIA-accelerated physics when it is released "when it's done".

It's easy to write about features but its a whole new ballgame when you actually get to see AGEIA accelerated physics in action. During our presentation we got to see a live deathmatch demo of an upcoming first person shooter called Cell Factor. (The deathmatch demo will be shown at AGEIA's booth later today at GDC). Developed by Artifical Studios and Immersion Software, the demo showed a mountainside base with tons of separate objects on screen, including crates, barrels, and massive pipes. Indeed there were so many objects on screen that the texture detail had to be toned down a tad just to get the game to run at an acceptable framerate. Yep, the graphics chip got overwhelmed by the demo, not the physics chip. The demo was being run on an Alienware rig with an Athlon 64 FX-60 CPU from AMD and dual NVIDIA 7800 GTX graphics cards running in SLI mode (when the AGEIA PhysX cards go on sale as an option later today the NVIDIA 7900 GTX will also be available as an option in Alienware systems).

The Cell Factor demo showed an impressive amount of interactivity within the enviroment as our character shot up crates into lots of different pieces, each of which stayed persistent in the level as opposed to just disappearing. The player in the Cell Factor demo has psi powers as well and we were able to see the character use that power to pick up individual pieces of those shattered crates. Of course you can also take the easy route and use a grenade to blow a pile of objects up and that was also demonstrated in the demo. Each object had its own mass as well; some objects could be moved easily, while others took more effort to move.

One of the PhysX tech demos

Another tech demo shot

Even cooler were the fluid effects in the game. No longer will you just see a texture of blood sprayed on the wall as you shoot an enemy. In the Cell Factor demo we saw a head blow up with globules of blood flowing out from the body where the head used to be. Ouch.

The Cell Factor demo

Shooting crates in the Cell Factor demo

One thing we had never seen before in a real-time game was the cloth physics in the demo. One part of the base had a huge cloth banner that not only could be shot through but torn as well in a realistic fashion. AGEIA showed off some movies that had more cloth physics effects like seeing cloth move on a frictionless surface versus one with a lot of friction as well as how the cloth animation moved while on a character in the game.

The Cell Factor demo was very cool to see and we look forward to going to AGEIA's booth later today to actually play the game with the physics enhancements against other players. We also should have more info that the company was not willing to talk about on Tuesday. We still have a lot of unanswered questions, such as how much the card will cost and how will game developers use all of the card's features. While it's still too early to render a verdict, at least the card itself will be in gamers hands very soon. We will hopefully get more info and some more testing and render a final review soon.