Nvidia Launches Physx 3.0 with Support for Emerging Gaming Platforms
June 10, 2011

Nvidia Launches Physx 3.0 with Support for Emerging Gaming Platforms

Santa Clara, Calif. -- Nvidia has launched Version 3.0 of the Nvidia PhysX SDK, a pervasive physics solution for highly realistic and real-time simulation-based effects for games, film, and more.
PhysX Version 3.0 has been more than three years in the making, and features a new modular architecture and a completely rewritten PhysX engine. It is designed to provide a significant boost in overall performance, as well as efficient, reliable simulations across a broad spectrum of multi-core gaming devices, such as PCs, notebooks, and gaming consoles, as well as emerging gaming platforms like handheld game devices, tablets, and smartphones.

Key features and capabilities of PhysX 3.0 SDK include:
• Larger Levels: In PhysX 3.0, developers can combine multiple actors into a single “aggregate”, which is managed as a single bounding-box entity in the broadphase stage of the collision pipeline. This reduces the computing load required to predict collisions between actors, and helps improve overall performance and memory efficiency of PhysX-3 relative to earlier versions.
• Streaming: PhysX 3.0 enables efficient streaming of asset data into a simulation through a new feature,binary in-place serialization, which allows quick and memory-efficient insertion of actors into a scene. In addition, out-of-scene actor creation, which allows actors to be created outside the scene and stored rather than being created and destroyed on demand, provides developers with better asset management while minimizing troublesome compute load spikes.
• More Effective Multithreading: The new Task Manager with managed thread pool allows games to take advantage of multi-core processors on all platforms, resulting in greatly increased performance and a much improved gaming experience.
• Flexible and Powerful Tools: In addition to a highly optimized physics runtime, Nvidia is releasing improved tools for artists that have been tailored to work within the developer’s asset production pipeline. A new release of PhysX Visual Debugger allows superior performance profiling, detailed memory analysis and improved visualization of all PhysX content across all major platforms.

PhysX 3.0 is available for all major gaming platforms, including PC, Xbox360, PlayStation 3, OSX, Linux, and Android. PhysX 3.0 is designed to run on a variety of CPU architectures. Performance can be accelerated by any CUDA-enabled Nvidia GPU, including any GeForce 8-series or higher graphics card.

Like its predecessor, PhysX 2.8, the new PhysX 3.0 SDK binary version is available without charge to all registered and platform-authorized developers for both commercial and non-commercial applications.