Mirrors Edge Performance Review

MIRRORS EDGE

Mirrors Edge by Electronic Arts was released for PC on January 13th 2009 and is the first game with fully integrated PhysX designed to run on Nvidia GPU's. Some time back Nvidia purchased Ageia which invented PhysX and a Physics Processing Unit that can perform PhysX processing much faster than a CPU. With the acquisition of Ageia Nvidia push the technology to the forefront of graphics processing. Previously PhysX was a phenomenon and you purchased a separate PhysX card which just kind of hung around in your machine and didn't do much for you. Ageia just didn't have the Corporate resources to mainstream PhysX even though it's a great idea for effects in games that provide a more realistic user intractable environment.

Mirrors Edge is the first full result of a year long intensive push for PhysX technology incorporation into current title Video games.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Ageia.

Ageia, founded in 2002, was a fabless semiconductor company. Ageia invented PhysX – a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; they also licensed out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.

Ageia was noted as being the first company to develop hardware designed to offload calculation of video game physics from the CPU to a separate chip. Prior to this, solutions from ATI and Nvidia had not been planned nor announced. Soon after the Ageia implementation of their PhysX processor, Nvidia and ATI announced their own physics implementations.

On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire Ageia. On February 13, 2008, the buyout of Ageia was finalized.

The PhysX engine is now known as Nvidia PhysX

To inject a note before we move on, notice that on February 13 2008 the buyout of Ageia was finalized. One year later to the day Mirrors Edge was released for PC with PhysX fully integrated. In computer integration terms that's light speed. Sometimes a technology can take years to fully integrate. What we are seeing now is just the beginning of PhysX in games and an early iteration of what it can become.

What Wikipedia has to say about Nvidia PhysX.

PhysX is a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK originally developed by Ageia (now NVIDIA) as the NovodeX SDK. The software was PhysX can also refer to a PPU add-in card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled video games. Video games supporting hardware acceleration by PhysX can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU, thus offloading physics calculations from the CPU allowing it to perform other tasks faster, and as such, the whole system can provide a higher framerate, resulting in a smoother gaming experience.

Middleware physics engines allow game developers to avoid writing their own code to handle the complex physics interactions possible in modern games. Sony has licensed the PhysX SDK for their PlayStation 3 video game console.

The PhysX engine and SDK are freely available for Windows and Linux.

In February 2008, NVIDIA bought Ageia and the PhysX engine and has begun integrating it into its CUDA framework, which already has multiple drivers for Linux, effectively rendering the PhysX add-in card redundant. With Intel's cancellation of Havok FX, PhysX is currently the only available solution for physics hardware acceleration.

In August 2008, NVIDIA released drivers that allow GeForce 8 series and above video cards to implement PhysX processing.

Notice that Wikipedia says (and we haven't confirmed) Intel canceled Havok FX and PhysX is the only available solution for for PhysX hardware acceleration. As far as we know Ageia PhysX cards will still work, but the most viable solution for enjoying the additional eye candy and realism PhysX can add to a game is an Nvidia GPU. We'll get more into the eye candy and realism a little later. As soon as someone chimes in we will update you on Havok being canceled by Intel we'll update you it never takes very long for someone to chime in. We're just quoting from Wikipedia there.