Aegia hammers old drum

Well, the world of in-game physics at least. Whilst the dedicated hardware product - the Physx card - has itself been something of a damp squib in terms of sales, Steele is still confident that Aegia has the right way of looking at the problem.

But why should gamers care about Physx? Well, Steele tells us that "The holy grail of physics in games is game-changing physics that impact gameplay. Not simply effects, but gameplay-changing. What we're seeing is a steady wave of content that's changing from the point at which we launched through today, on into 2007 with game-changing elements in upcoming games like CellFactor, Warmonger, Ubisoft's Ghost Recon 2, and a number of games built on the UE3 engine from Epic, which we're integrated deeply into."

That's great, but that's no reason to buy a card now. There have been UE3 engine games coming for years, and they all seem to be set back and back. Aegia seems to be setting out its hopes on Warmonger, a UE3 game from the guys that created Auto Assault, the car-based MMO. That's going to have these 'deep' integrated features, but the game could yet turn out to be decidedly average - Auto Assault didn't exactly set the world on fire.

Whilst GRAW2, from Ubisoft, is on the horizon for PC gamers, initial previews suggest that there's little to expect beyond the superficial particle effects we saw from Physx in GRAW 1.

But, what is a certainty is that graphics cards are getting faster quicker than games are getting more complicated, leaving spare processing power that both the Green Goblins and DAAMIT are keen to exploit for physics processing. Havok is designed to be software to facilitate that, but Steele iterates that "It's not build for hardware," the implication being that graphics processing support is something of a shoe-in that can't compete with dedicated hardware.

Which is true, but given that there are actually Havok-based games out there, this is perhaps moot. Perhaps the biggest challenge that Steele's Aegia faces is that integrating physics deeply into a game engine fundamentally changes the gameplay mechanics, creating a very real schism between the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. A game running on an 8800 is still the same game as runs on a 6200, just with much better graphics. But a game running with a deep physics hardware implementation will actually physically (hah!) differ from a software rendition, given the gameplay consequences that the differing physics calculations will have. So whilst it would be great to have a game that offers amazingly complex physics, developers writing to that end are splitting their gaming community in half, and that is worrying.

Aegia needs to tie up a deal with Intel or AMD and get its technology onto a spare core somewhere, and fast. Only that way can the tech be ubiquitous enough to really have a market impact, and only then five years down the line. Tricky times. µ