Mirror's Edge PC Version to Support PhysX

To say that we've been waiting a while for a game to make good use of the PhysX engine would be a huge understatement. Since we first covered PhysX well over three years ago, we've seen some freeware games come and go, but rarely did we see good use of the technology in a commercial game. One exception would be Unreal Tournament III, where two downloadable levels utilized it to a good degree.

Well, you can breathe a sigh of relief, as NVIDIA has just announced that upcoming PC game Mirror's Edge, will make heavy use of the technology. This game has been on many gamer's radar for some time, as it attempts to stray away from typical gameplay and deliver one that's totally unique. As you can tell from the screenshots below, the game definitely looks unique, too.

In previous PhysX-enhanced titles, we've seen realistic shattering glass, smoke, liquid, cloth and more, and all of that will be present in this game. Pushing things further, the physics enhancements can both affect the player and the overall gameplay. Ground fog, for example, will react to the player walking through it.

The screenshots below can give a quick glimpse of what to expect from the game, and the video below links to our Vimeo account which houses the preview video in its original 720p format. I can honestly say that this is one game I'm really looking forward to, and perhaps PhysX-support makes up for the game being delayed on the PC. The game's received great reviews so far, so I'm hoping we can expect equally-impressive gameplay on the PC in January.

With the NVIDIA PhysX physics engine, the world of Mirror’s Edge comes to life with real affects of wind, weapons impact, and in-game movements. Every-day objects within the game become part of the overall experience. Cloth, flags, and banners can now impact weapons and players; ground fog interacts with the player’s footsteps; explosions fill the air with smoke and debris; and weapon impacts are enhanced with interactive particles.

Source: Mirror's Edge - NVIDIA PhysX Video

Woman Loses $400,000 to Nigerian Scammers

Online scams are nothing new, and by now I'm sure most people visiting this site are bored stiff of even hearing about them. One of the more rampant scams on the Internet for a while has been tied to the country of Nigeria, where there are apparently many ready to find a sucker on these and other shores to make a quick buck. In a recent case, it was revealed that people continue to fall for such ploys, some to the worst possible degree.

In the case of Janella Spears of Oregon, her naivety cost her an incredible $400,000. She originally was contacted by some Nigerian scammer who promised huge payoffs for small donations. Originally, the money she was asked to send didn't total much, but after the scammers realized how naive she was, they ended up stealing over $400K, which is hard to even comprehend.

This wasn't a quick transaction, either. The entire event took over two years to finish, and despite her family telling her that it was a scam, she continued until she was broke. It's easy to outright flame someone like this, but the important thing to gleam from it is that people actually still do fall for these scams. Hard to believe that the largest known Nigerian online scam to happen, happened now, even years after they've been known about.

When Spears began to doubt the scam, she got letters from the President of Nigeria, FBI Director Mueller, and President Bush. Terrorists could get the money if she did not help, Bush’s letter said. Spears continued to send funds. All the letters were fake, of course. She wiped out her husband’s retirement account, mortgaged the house and took a lien out on the family car. Both were already paid for.

Source: KATU News

Left 4 Dead Redefines What Co-Op Modes Should Be

It might be a bit hard (read: very hard) to wait for Half-Life 2: Episode Three to surface, but Valve hasn't been slack in delivering updates to their current games to give us something to do. To help make us forget HL2 for a while longer, they just released a brand-new title called Left 4 Dead that furthers their stance on just how important multi-player gaming is.

With L4D, they took things to the next level. While some games offer co-op gameplay as an option, Valve encourages it to such a great degree, that the single-player campaign is highly discouraged by all of the reviews I've seen so far. Ars Technica is one such site to take a look at the game, and overall, "Left 4 Dead was a game that was made with love" just about says it all.

Their review puts the game in a great light, noting that the Source engine still has what it takes to deliver a great-looking experience, the audio looks (or sounds) to be top-rate, and despite the fact that the game is short, the replayability is high, which is something I've read in every review I've taken a look at. Overall, Valve has a winner on their hands, and I only wish I had time to play it now.

It's surprising that a game that only has five to six hours of content has been made infinitely replayable via the AI that mixes things up. Every time I step into a level I move slowly and cautiously; you never know what you're going to see around the corner. The camraderie that comes with playing with good friends and defending their characters is also a big draw; you'll be recounting the stories of your exploits to bored wives and girlfriends for the next few months.

Source: Ars Technica

NVIDIA Helps Create "Personal Supercomputers"

Over the course of the past year, NVIDIA has been actively pushing their GPUs as excellent performers outside of gaming, and for most of us, this was a rather new concept. We quickly found out, though, that GPUs were indeed superb performers when executed in a certain manner.

It goes without saying that where GPGPU programming is concerned, we're still in its infancy, but over the course of the past year, I've slowly become more of a believer in what the technology can accomplish. If you care at all about the progress of research in the medical field, then just taking a look at how much more a GPU can accomplish with Folding@home when compared to a normal CPU will help make you a believer.

"Personal Supercomputer" is a term that's been thrown around quite a bit in the past, but when dealing with scenarios that can execute off of a GPU architecture, then it's far easier to accomplish. To help make this point even clearer, NVIDIA has published a release that unveiled their "Personal Supercomputer" platform, which numerous vendors are currently supporting. Each configuration will vary, but the fastest ones will include the Tesla C1060. The largest configurations in a single-chassis/rack unit will deliver upwards of 3.732 TFLOPS of computing power.

By using their GPUs, NVIDIA claims, you can achieve "Cluster Class" performance with 1/100th of the available space, and at 1/10th the overall power consumption. Those claims are huge, but believable. I'm no coder, and I certainly don't handle any supercomputers, but I'm still not entirely confident that GPUs can replace CPUs for any kind of SC computing, but if you're lucky enough that GPUs will work out just fine, the performance benefits are nothing short of jaw-dropping.

"GPUs have evolved to the point where many real world applications are easily implemented on them and run significantly faster than on multi-core systems," said Prof. Jack Dongarra, director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee and author of LINPACK. "Future computing architectures will be hybrid systems with parallel-core GPUs working in tandem with multi-core CPUs."

Source: NVIDIA Press Release

Tech Roundup - November 19, 2008

Displays & Video Cards
• ASUS EN9800GT Matrix 512MB - PC Perspective
• MSI GeForce 9800GT 512MB - Phoronix
• Sapphire Radeon HD4650 OC Edition 512MB - Modders-Inc
• Sapphire Radeon HD 4830 - Budget Overclocking - Overclock3D
• Sapphire HD 4850 X2 - Overclockers Online
• XFX 9800GTX+ Black Edition - Bjorn3D
• XFX GeForce GTX 260 Black Edition - Legit Reviews
• ZOTAC GeForce 9800 GT 512MB AMP - TheTechLounge

Memory & Storage
• Kingston 4GB DataTraveler Mini Slim - Hardware Bistro
• OCZ Diesel and ATV Stick - Technic3D
• Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1TB External Hard Drive - Think Computers
• Seagate Free Agent Go 320GB External Hard Drive - Big Bruin
• Thermaltake BlacX External Hard Drive Docking Station - TweakNews

Peripherals & Gadgets
• Sanyo R227 Internet Radio - Digital Trends

Cooling
• Gelid Solutions Silent Spirit - Hardware Bistro
• Scythe Musashi GPU Cooler - Pro-Clockers

Chassis & Power Supplies
• Cooler Master HAF 932 Full-Tower - Virtual-Hideout
• Corsair HX1000W Power Supply - Bjorn3D
• Revoltec Seventy1 Computer Case - TweakPC

Competitions, Complete Systems & Et cetera
• Velocity Micro Edge Z55 - Intel Core i7 Gaming System - HotHardware