Nvidia has just inked a deal to provide all registered PlayStation3 developers with a copy of its PhysX software developers kit, a move that both it and Sony hope will bring more advanced physics processing to games on the platform. That means better effects like destructible objects and terrain, more realistic reactions to movement, life-like hair and more.
PhysX is a middleware platform that's designed to simplify the development and implementation of physics processing in games and other applications.
It provides a high-level abstraction layer between applications and the hardware that processes the physics calculations (and that hardware can include both CPUs and GPUs).
Consisting of an API and a physics engine, PhysX has been available to PC developers for some time, and Nvidia already had deals in place with several games developers, including EA and 2K Games, to use the PhysX engine. Now all PS3 developers have free access to it. It's not yet known how many actually plan to use it for upcoming games.
Although the PS3 uses the Nvidia-developed RSX "Reality Synthesizer" GPU in the PS3, PhysX on the PS3 appears to actually use the Cell CPU for physics processing rather than the GPU.
This is because the PS3 GPU is based on the older G70 architecture (it's virtually the same processor as used in GeForce 7800). That architecture has discrete pixel and vertex shaders and is less useful than the more recent G80 architecture for PhysX. On the PC, PhysX is only available for GeForce Series 8 and above.