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Cell Factor

We also tested the Cellfactor demo.

With fully interactive environments and the ability to send any number of objects in mass at an opponent, CellFactor's exceptional gameplay can amuse even the most discerning gamer for hours. Unlike the minor particle enhancements seen in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, the PhysX PPU offers far more than eye candy when running CellFactor. Although still in development, this title and engine gave gamers the clearest preview of what Ageia's hardware will be capable of in the future. For our testing purposes, we completed five identical laps of the map and alternated between throwing grenades and firing grenades from our weapon every ten seconds.

Ageia went on it's ass with this game. Amazing physics are displayed in this game, yet with a small and simple trick you can run the physics calculation over your CPU, bringing you roughly the exact same performance and experience.

The new demo of CellFactor shows what Ageia can do. We see some really remarkable Physics at work in this game. But where Graw has too little happening, this game has too much. Literally everywhere objects are doing something which can be a tad frustrating.

We did try the EnablePhysX=false config file setting and yes the games plays very well. But rest assured that explosions are visibly slow without PPU.  The game works, and in most cases works quite well in software mode, but there are some things, such as all of the cloth, that simply aren't there in software mode. Meaning that some things in this game at this point still do require it.

And when a so-called sail/cloth gets to the screen, fps drops without the PhySX card. The PPU starts to shine where normally your system would clog up.

No benchmarks .. as we can't benchmark CellFactor in any useful way. What we can do is show you some differences. We recorded three seperate movies of PhysX implementations in the Cell Factor demo that you don't receive if you apply the EnablePhysX=false setting. This this is the eye-candy that only shows with the PhysX card.

Movies:

• CellFactor 1 (1.89 MB) - Observe where I'm walking to the cave and shoot at the cloth kind of strings. It's a very good example of Physics calculations and they are done by the PPU. Disable the card and you will not see this function.
• CellFactor 2 (1.45 MB) - In this second movie we focus on that huge banner, the cloth calculations are done by the PPU. Watch carefully how gracefully the cloth falls down once shot at. Physics at it's best, really impressive.
• CellFactor 3 660 KB) - Last but not least a heavy number of particles that move away from the explosion. This function does work properly with the PPU disabled, yet the overall framerate will drop intensely as that's a lot of CPU cycles right there.

CellFactor 1 Movie - To the left the PPU disabled, to the right it is enabled.

CellFactor 2 Movie - To the left the PPU disabled, to the right it is enabled.

I figured showing you the stuff that matters is more important then the benchmarks as the PPU is really not about benchmarks at all. This also concludes the stuff we had in-house to actually do some PhysX stuff with. Let's move onwards to the verdict.