Physx shows off UT3 effects

The dedicated hardware physics unit has long been promised support in Epic's upcoming killer shooter, and it's been touted as the PPU's killer app, before it's even released - and, more to the point, before anyone's really seen what can be done.

Well, Ageia has been showing off PPU-powered Unreal this week in Leipzig and, yes, the demo footage shown does look pretty neat - a hurricane sweeping through a level, tearing up the scenery and generally behaving like a hurricane does, according to the laws of physics. One particularly neat touch is the fact that rockets being fired past will get sucked into the vortex.

Here's the worrying thing for PPU fans - Ageia is describing the footage as being of a "mod" for Unreal Tournament 3. "In-game footage of a Physx-powered mod" is the exact phrase. Now far be it from us to read too much into language, but doesn't that rather imply that the hardcore PhysX action is not going to be integrated into the core gameplay experience, but that a choose-to-install mod will be the focus of the action instead?

And if that's the case, won't that be a blow to Ageia, which was obviously hoping for de facto inclusion in every install?

Epic has long mused, both privately and to the press, about the implications of fully integrating a PPU into a game engine. The trouble is that if you use a Physx card properly - running the game's physics through the engine to make it more realistic - you change the way the game behaves for non PPU owners, thus making it impossible for them to play together. In this sense, a PPU is not like a GPU, which offers merely cosmetic differences.

We wonder if Epic hasn't built a nice modded version of things to keep Ageia happy, one which will nevertheless completely lack the mainstream adoption they've clearly been craving.

Grim times for dedicated physics? We wonder. µ