CellFactor Demo

The screenshots above show the effects quality provided by AGEIA PhysX in CellFactor demo. We didn’t have any critical comments about the shattering and breaking (but for some reason not deforming) pipes, boxes and barrels as well as the smoke. However, when it came to liquid effects, the results turned out quite far from ideal.

Although the liquid streaming from a broken barrel and the blood of the main character behave according to the physical laws, they look nothing like real blood or real liquid. It is especially true for blood that looks more like some sticky mess consisting of dark-red bubbles. It is not the issue with AGEIA accelerator, because it depends on the game developers’ methods, so the final version of CellFactor game may have much better liquids implementation. At the same time, the heat haze effect created with fluid objects and pixel shaders look very realistic.

Other than that, even this single-level of the CellFactor demo looks quite impressive and shows very well the advantages of physics accelerators. You cannot get anything like that having only the computational power of your CPU: there are too many objects with physical features to be calculated. Moreover, heavy objects like containers and machinery have different physics than lightweight pipes and boxes.

Since we couldn’t analyze the performance difference in CellFactor with and without the PhysX processor, we decided to offer you a time diagram. It shows how greatly the gaming performance may drop because of massive effects.

Having obtained the performance results for each given moment of time we managed to calculate the average performance level. As you see, if there is a single Radeon X1900 XTX graphics card in the system, the overage performance will be quite low, less than 40fps. In fact, we expected something like that with the massive special effects enabled.

The momentary performance diagrams are not that smooth, which indicates that the performance in CellFactor may vary within a very wide range. If there is an effect involving a lot of objects, you may notice a significant performance drop at this time. It is especially typical for liquid effects. It could be the performance of the graphics card pixel processors that affects the results so badly. I believe that appropriate optimization of the gaming engine or graphics card driver could help in this case.

In common situations, when the player simply runs over the level without making much mess, the performance is well above 30-35fps, especially in 1024x768. CellFactor is a new generation game, so you shouldn’t really expect the today’s hardware to ensure superior performance in this game.