This is the best PhysX can do?
Not impressed at all.
I bet the PhysX will slow down your frames by 20% at least plus killing your CPU.
This remains me of Crysis and XP , when you modify the settings files to get the effects up.
Plus somewhere , someone will crack the game and allow the Radeon users the effects.

That said, the API can also run on a standard x86 processor, the PlayStation 3's Cell CPU, or one of the old PhysX PCI cards.

Cool, so if you are a Radeon user, you could still enjoy the physics effects if you had a PhysX card. Also, having a physX card i would almost think would be preferable to dumping it over to the GPU, as i would imagine you would not suffer from as massive of a frame rate drop whenever it had to suddenly render a scene with lots of heavy physics involved. Maybe i am wrong, but i would think it would be better to keep the GPU doing graphics and, a PPU doing physics, and the cpu working on everything else.

720p HD video at http://images.tweaktown.com/videos/%20MirrorsEdge_PhysX_720p.wmv

Well,once you found out the "gold" was actually spray painted laminex I guess that would be understandable :)

A dedicated video made to highlight the mega hyped physics capability of NVidia cards and we get a few particles floating across the screen and a cloth curtain or two.?
ATi marketing must have enjoyed watching it...

Meh not impressed at all. Looks trivial to me.

So there's stuff that's not even in the game without PhysX enabled? Right now it appears to be pure eyecandy that doesn't heavily impact gameplay but I wonder if there will be future titles where PhysX is required.

Sounds like a win for NV, they've been better at working with devs than ATi for some time. I'd like to know the terms of the deal though to know how exclusive it is, it would be nice to see companies use OpenCL in the future.

This reminds me of how much I love the premise of Borderlands but how unsure I am of how it'll turn out.

Useless particle effects that don't actaully impact playability are so 2006.

In the video, are they slowing down the parts where they are showcasing the effects, or is framerate dropping that much? Its tough to tell.

And what is AMDs answer on this?

youtube seems to be screwing up. I show it dl'ing but cannot play, either embedded or on the site itself...

The comparison seems a little dubious to me. I don't know all the ins/outs of in game physics rendering but the items being shown with physics are not even present in the rendering without physics. I find it hard to believe that you need physics to even show the banners and cloth barriers that are being shot at.

At least, they could have shown the banners being shot in the physics off video to see how they don't sway as much or at all. I mean the guy is shooting at air in the physics off video of course there won't be any physics.

This is the big problem that AMD really has to make an answer for. Their cards are practically equal in performance, but Nvidia cards have so many extra features and benefits that are being widely supported that adds much more value to their cards. PhysX, CUDA, better Folding performance, and bundled games like CoD 4, Crysis and now Far Cry 2.

AMD has the deal with Blizzard to bundle games, they are apparently going to implement the same 'scratch memory' for better Folding performance (though they might be putting that off until the HD5000-series), and they've recently slashed prices for the 4870 quite a bit (hopefully the X2 will follow). Yet out of all of these only the price cuts have actually materialized, and the Christmas season isn't over yet. I don't mention Havok because it doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

At first I didn't notice the 'slowed down' message at the bottom, so I thought that the game itself was running rather poorly. Heheh, *duuurrrr*

The video does not work.

Linky?

When I click the video I get:

We're sorry, this video is no longer available.

Viewing the embedded video is giving a "We're sorry, this video is no longer available" error.

But double clicking it and watching it on youtube works fine.

Now about the article it really seems that PhysX and hopefully soon AMD's version are starting to catch on in games.