PC Games Hardware has done a really nice and in-depth technical interview about the upcoming Metro Last Light. PC Games Hardware spoke to Oles Shishkovtsov, CTO at 4A Games to talk about the different technology that will be implemented into the game and most interesting and exciting to us the GPU PhysX support! When asked if we can expect some PhysX improvements from Metro: 2033 Oles replies with “Yes, you can expect a lot of improvements, especially in destruction and debris.” You can read the entire interview here.
PC Games Hardware: You keep the support for GPU PhysX in Metro Last Light. If so can we expect some improvements or enhancements compared to Metro 2033 (e.g. soft bodies, debris, and destructible environments)? What graphics card do you recommend for maxed details in Full HD with Antialiasing? An upcoming Nvidia Kepler-based Geforce for example?
Oles Shishkovtsov: Yes, you can expect a lot of improvements, especially in destruction and debris. The upcoming Geforce cards will be fully supported.
PC Games Hardware: When benchmarking Metro 2033 we found out that the engine utilized more than four cores of multicore CPUs if we were using the advanced PhysX effects on CPU, so you are utilizing Nvidias PhysX SDK 3.x? Will all the advanced PhysX effects only be available in PC version?
Oles Shishkovtsov: That’s the common misconception that PhysX 2.X cannot be multithreaded. Actually it is internally designed to be multithreaded! The only thing – it takes some programmer time to enable that multi-threading (actually task generation), mostly to integrate with engine task-model and ensure proper load-balancing. So, 2033 used PhysX 2.8.3, and Last Light uses similar, a slightly modified version at the time of writing. And yes, advanced PhysX effects will be available only on PC.
machinima has uploaded a sweet Metro Last Light Exclusive 12-Minute Playthrough video that shows off some amazing use of PhysX. This past week we reported on a Metro: Last Light developer interview that NVIDIA conducted where it was confirmed that like Metro: 2033, Metro: Last night will make use of PhysX. In the interview the developer said that a “huge amount of particle effects will be used” along with cloth, and fog. You can watch the rest of the interview here. This new gameplay video shows this in action and it looks really impressive.
Below are some YouTube linked to a certain time in the video where you can see the new PhysX effects.
GeForce.com’s Andy Burnes got to speak and do a nice interview with one of the developers of Metro: Last Light. The interview talks about some of the features in Last Light and most importantlyy to us discusses the physics that will be implemented into the game. Just like Metro 2033, Metro: Last Light will make use of PhysX for cloth and particle effects. Starting at 6:16 in the video interview, the developer talks about the PhysX effects and mentioned that a “huge amount of particle effects will be used” along with cloth, and fog. You can watch the rest of the interview here and check out the E3 Gameplay Trailer and demo videos below. They also have a pretty nice website for Metro 2033: Last Light up here.
The ‘Ranger Pack’ DLC for Metro 2033 is now available and downloads automatically with Steam. Along with this new DLC there is also now an official benchmarking tool with an option to enable/disable PhysX. This benchmarking tool is very well done, you can select all the different DirectX settings DX9/DX10/DX11, different screen resolutions and pretty much all the options you can find in the game along with a check box to enable or disable advanced PhysX. We made a video below of the benchmark running though a single time to see what it looks like. As Metro 2033 is one of the most graphics intensive games that takes advantage of DX11 this Benchmarking could become standard for benchmarking games and future DX11 video cards.
Metro 2033 PhysX Benchmark 1920×1200:
For some reason this tool is well hidden within the steam directory. To find the benchmark you will have to find it in your Metro 2033 steam install: Steam\steamapps\common\metro 2033
When you launch the benchmarking tool you have a very nice GUI to change settings and launch the benchmark:
Upon completion of the benchmark you get a very nice HTML screen show up in your browser giving you the statistics from the benchmark run:
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Hawken is Adhesive Games’ upcoming free-to-play multiplayer mech combat game built with Epic Games’ Unreal Development Kit (UDK) and Unreal Engine 3. I first saw this game back when it was first announced and was very impressed with the visuals. Now I am even more excited and interested in this game with the recent newsRead More
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