Interview

Whoopty: Hi Dan, thanks for doing this interview with me.

Dan: That's no problem at all.

Whoopty: Now, to kick things off, for those that don't know, what is the idea behind PhysX?

Dan: Gaming has come along way in the last few years, however most of the improvements have been geared towards graphics; visual imprpvemenrs. If you look back to early FPS games, although modern games are more complex than back then, the gameplay itself hasn't significantly changed. I think that's where the general idea of advancing physics in games is coming from, you can really change the way a game plays, not just the way it looks.

Whoopty: I see, and what about the PhysX add-on card, what was the thinking behind that?

Dan: This was based around the fact that physics calculations tend to add a lot of load to a PC, and we didn't want people to have to choose between lots of physics effects, or lots of visual effects; so we put together the hardware to allow the physics calculations to be done independenatly from the rest of the PC.

Whoopty: What advantages does the PhysX SDK have over other physics based options such as the Havok engine?

Dan: The PhysX engine has been distributed hugely, much more than the Havok engine and it has also been around for so long, that we have an incredible ammount of experience using it. No piece of software is ever final, there is always something that you can improve on, and we are constantly improving our engine using not only our vast experience of its use in games but the feedback from developers. Basically, we are at a point when the PhysX SDK is much easier to use than any other software or hardware physics solutions out there.

Secondly, the cost. PhysX is completely free to use, so any game developer can use it for nothing. Finally, Epic Games have used our PhysX engine in their Unreal Engine 3, which shows that our SDK is a sophisitcated piece of software because UE3 is out there to be the best; and they decided to partner up with us.

Whoopty: There's lots of controversy surrounding the PhysX card itself. Many people consider it redundant compared to dual core and quad core CPUs. How does the hardware compare to multi-cores in terms of performance?

Dan: Multi-core CPUs have been around for about 2 years now, and software developers are only just learning how to effectively start using a second core. So even though in the future, developers will be able to utilise 4, 8 cores or more - and they will definately be very useful - there is a learning curve with all new hardware. I mean, DX9 games are much better looking than they were when DX9 was first released, so it always takes time to utilise new technologies. What the PhysX card does, is completely remove the need for multithread programming for physics, making game developement much easier for the developers; so ease of use is the main point.

Secondly, dedicated hardware designed for one thing will always be more powerful than a CPU which is a multipurpose piece of hardware. The PhysX card was designed from the very beginning to deal with physics, so that's what it's good at. Although a core on a CPU can deal with physics, its not what its designed for and therfore is not as capable as the add-on card is.