

We’ve been hearing about hardware-accelerated physics in games for years now. First there was the PhysX hardware physics acceleration card from Ageia, which never really gained much traction. Support was incorporated into Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, but didn’t do much. The company worked with UbiSoft to build a custom “Ageia Island” map to showcase what hardware-boosted physics could do, but it was sort of an afterthought.

Meanwhile, GPU vendors teamed up with the very popular physics middleware vendor Havok to build physics acceleration that could run on a graphics card. But Havok got acquired by Intel and that movement sort of fizzled out.

Last year, Nvidia acquired Ageia, dumped plans for the custom physics accelerator card, and started building software to let Nvidia GPUs accelerate PhysX through CUDA. A game that utilized PhysX middleware still needs to implement specific support for GPU acceleration, and that has been scarce as well—outside of a couple of custom maps for Unreal Tournament 3, there really hasn’t been support in any major AAA title.

Mirror’s Edge from Electronic Arts changes all that. It is the first major AAA title to ship with an option for GPU-accelerated PhysX right out of the box, adding effects throughout the entire game. Today we’ll take a look at what it adds, and what sort of performance hit you can expect. Continued…