NVIDIA Brings PhysX SDK To Nintendo Wii

NVIDIA Brings PhysX SDK To Nintendo Wii

Thursday, March 19, 2009 - by Shawn Oliver
And here we were thinking that Sony's PlayStation 3 had something special going on. Merely 24 hours after NVIDIA announced that its PhysX technology would be coming over to the PS3, the company has gone and essentially announced the very same thing for the Wii. Or, as NVIDIA puts it, it has been approved as a "third party tools solution provider for the Wii consolue," and as a result of that, the PhysX SDK is now available for registered Wii developers.

According to Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA: "Nintendo has reshaped the home entertainment and video game market with the success of the Wii console. Adding a PhysX SDK for Wii is key to our cross-platform strategy and integral to the business model for our licensed game developers and publishers. With NVIDIA PhysX technology, developers can easily author more realistic game environments for the evolving demands of a broad class of Wii gamers."

For those unaware, the NVIDIA PhysX software development kit (SDK) consists of a full-featured API and physics engine, which is designed to give developers, animators, level designers, and artists "unprecedented creative control" over character and object physical interactions by allowing them to author scalable physics in real time. In other words, we could see games with an even higher level of focus on physics hit the Wii, and considering just how physics-based its controller is, we can definitely say we're excited about the possibilities.


Via: NVIDIA | News Archive | Tags: Nvidia, PhysX, Nintendo, Wii
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By 3vi1 on Mar 19, 2009

I thought nVidia's PhysX page has said it's supported on the PS3, 360, Wii, and PC for a while now? (http://www.nvidia.com/object/nvidia_physx.html)

Is nVidia making press releases because no one noticed? Is there going to be a release about the 360 tomorrow?

By ice91785 on Mar 19, 2009

With the "power" that the Wii has I don't quite understand how better environment processing will improve gameplay a ton...am I missing something here?

By 3vi1 on Mar 19, 2009

You're right in that this probably won't show a heck of a lot of benefit in the form of new physics on the Wii.

What it does do, however, is allow developers to right the code once - using a single API - then move that code to the other platforms and crank the effects up or down easily.

It might also save them time writing their own basic physics functions (I really have no idea what kind of functions the API includes). It seems like it would save development time.

By ice91785 on Mar 20, 2009

Ooooohhh...

 

So its a helpful tool for going cross-platform is what your saying. If thats true then it makes great sense...seeing as completely different programming for the same game on 3 consoles, 2 handhelds and a PC maaaaay cost quite a bit of $$ for development

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