NVIDIA PhysX Technology Helps Batman Escape Arkham Asylum

• October 21, 2009
• Written by Mark
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The Nvidia nTersect Blog has an interesting article about PhysX in Batman Arkham Asylum and how the developers used PhysX in the game. “NVIDIA PhysX technology provided them the right development platform to make the comic book environment of Arkham Asylum come to life.”

from the Nvidia nTersect blog:

At NVIDIA, we want gamers to feel the thrill of ultra-realistic gaming environments. For total immersion, gaming environments have to look and feel as real as possible and characters must be able to move and interact with the objects that have a dramatic impact on game play. For London-based RockSteady Game Studios, developers of Batman: Arkham Asylum, only NVIDIA PhysX technology provided them the right development platform to make the comic book environment of Arkham Asylum come to life.

Based on its Metacritic score of 92, it’s clear that Batman: Arkham Asylum is a great game on any platform. But only when you play on a PC with a GeForce 8800 GTX series GPU or better, can you experience some of the most realistic physics effects in gaming.

If you’ve never played a game with PhysX before, you are in for a treat. With PhysX and NVIDIA GPUs, you can experience:
• Fog and smoke swirling around you and react realistically with the environment.
• Objects shattering when you throw your criminally insane opponents into them. Floor tiles pop up and go flying, wall tiles chip and break, pillars crumble on impact, glass and debris break into pieces as they fall.
• Loose papers shuffle and flutter as you move through them. Outside, falling leaves react to your movements.
• Creepy cloth banners sway in the air or get shredded by your Batarang.
• Explosions are bigger, brighter – better.

You can see all these effects and more in this video. Of course, it takes real-time computing of complex physics algorithms to make it all happen. As processors get more powerful (like, say, when GPUs built on the new Fermi architecture are out), these immersive effects are only going to get more pervasive—and impressive.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Tags: Batman, Nvidia, PhysX