Shortly after NVIDIA announced their acquisition of AGEIA Technologies, they followed-up with a press release stating that "NVIDIA Makes Physics A Reality For Gamers." Since that time, game developers have committed to support PhysX, which coincided with an announcement that the GeForce Power Pack had surpassed the million download milestone in less than two weeks.
One of the features in the GeForce Power Pack consists of the Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Mod, which was tested on the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked.
Unreal Tournament 3
Owners of a NVIDIA GeForce 8 series or later graphics card with a full version of Unreal Tournament 3 have the unique opportunity to tear up additional levels of Unreal Tournament 3 through some exclusive NVIDIA PhysX technology features. The PhysX Mod offers three new levels of environmental destruction including destructible walls, floors, walkways, rooftops and new weapons. New levels include: Heat Ray, Lighthouse & Tornado. The UT3 PhysX Mod Pack requires a full version of Unreal Tournament 3 - It is not a stand-alone title. Make sure to enable "Hardware Physics" under Video Settings in the UT3 settings.
The following test results are based on a custom demo that was recorded using the PhysX enabled HeatRay level. Upon entering the in-game console, the command to play back a demo in Unreal Torunament 3 is "demoplay demoname".
Two runs were made at the resolution of 1920x1200 with no antialiasing - one with in-game Hardware Physics set to on (green bar) and the other to off (blue bar). First is the average frame rate.
Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Performance
And minimum frame rate.
Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX Performance
Gameplay Comments
The Unreal Tournament Series continues to provide fast-paced and entertaining gameplay, which is precisely what the EVGA GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 Superclocked was put through. An Instant Action Deathmatch was configured against 5 bots as gameplay consisted of approximately 7,400 frames on the standard HeatRay level at the resolution of 1920x1200 with no antialiasing. At the end of the test, Fraps recorded an average of 62fps and minimum of 51fps.
Unreal Tournament 3
A subsequent test was to run the PhysX enabled HeatRay level with in-game hardware physics enabled and disabled. With hardware physics enabled, the average/minimum frame rate was 47/32, which dropped to 20/13 with hardware physiscs disabled. The increased performance with hardware physics enabled is clearly a benefit that the GPU brings to accelerating the performance of PhysX enabled applications.
