It is now official – Borderlands 2 will be the next game to support GPU accelerated PhysX effects.
Update: GPU PhysX trailer was caught on camera
Update #2: new official PhysX trailer
At GeForce Kepler Editor’s Day (event, during which Kepler GPUs were presented to press), Borderlands 2 demo featuring GPU PhysX effects was demonstrated by Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Founder and CEO, running on a GeForce GTX 680 GPU.
Hardware accelerated content will include:
- Fully simulated tearable cloth which interacts with weapons, forces, weather, etc
- Persistent GPU simulated particles that interact with the world
- Fully-interactive fluids
- Maybe something more
Update: Some impressions from journalists who saw the live demo:
The PC version of Gearbox Software’s upcoming Borderlands 2 is set to support many PhysX enhancements. These include water that reacts accurately to a player’s movements, rippling and splashing around the environment as you walk through it.
Borderlands 2 also makes use of PhysX to render destruction. For example, fire a rocket launcher into the ground, and huge chunks of earth and gravel fly into the air. The resulting debris settles on the floor, where you can kick it around by walking through it.
At NVIDIA’s press event we were treated to a demo of Borderlands 2 with PhysX enhancements including some impressive water simulation, enhanced (destructible!) cloth physics and volumetric smoke trails from rockets, which animated beautifully.
At NVIDIA’s Editor’s Day, Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford showed off Borderlands 2 and how it implemented PhysX. Fluids pooled and flowed in complete real-time, and even reacted to explosions — splashing about into numerous smaller puddles.
Cloth materials reacted accordingly to foreign objects, and could even be torn and shredded when fired at.
It was quite incredible how these effects could be handled with such relative ease in real-time, when just five years ago it took me several hours to render them for 3D animations on a high-end PC.
We hope that Gearbox will provide more detailed information, including screenshots or video, soon enough.
Borderlands 2 is slated to be released in September, 2012.