nVidia has been making many advances in General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit (GPGPU) computing. While this is great news for the PC owner with an nVidia-powered Graphics Card, it is also great news for the PS3 owner. One of the major areas that nVidia is pushing with its GPGPU is Physics processing, with its recently-purchased Ageia subsidiary, makers of the PhysX engine, which is also used within many PS3 games. This is great news for PS3 gamers, as it should lead to more involved physics in games as developers use and stretch the capabilities of consoles and PC’s alike.

Up until now, PC owners have had to use expensive additional cards to enable PhysX processing, however with the advent of GPGPU, this can be processed on a mid-range 8800GT graphics card with no major performance hit. Because of this, the number of gamers capable of using PhysX have gone from “very few, niche” to “large number of gaming users” almost overnight. This means that developers can now produce new games using the PhysX engine without worrying over-much about whether the users are going to have the capability of running the game, so they can include large, better, and more gameplay-integrated physics. As the recent Star Wars: The Force Unleashed has shown, Physics can add a large amount of fun to gameplay, and can give rise to new styles of gaming.

So why is this good news for PS3 owners? The more that developers use PhysX, the better they are going to be with it. And with many console games eventually making their way to the PC market, one potential barrier to conversion has just been removed - leading to elements that might have been removed now remaining in the game.

Good news for PC gamers, better news for PS3 gamers, and hopefully better games all around.

Filed under: Games, Main