GRIN's PhysX hardware-accelerated effects for Terminator: Salvation will include features such as destructible environments, more realistic weapons effects, better player interactivity with things like trash and clutter and various smoke and particle effects. GRIN uses its own in-game graphics engine for their titles and during the conference call the development team said it was easy to implement the special hardware-accelerated PhysX technology into the game. The game is currently scheduled for release on May 21.
Another upcoming game that will use hardware supported PhysX effects is Darkest of Days. This time-travel themed first person shooter comes from developer 8monkey Labs, a division of the game publisher Phantom EFX. The company previously released a number of casual casino PC games to stores but this is its first attempt at a hardcore action game. Similar to GRiN, 8monkey Labs is using its own in-house graphics engine for the visuals of Darkest of Days.
As a time agent, your character will bounce back and forth in time to various time periods including historical events such as the Battle of Antietam in the US Civil War, along with World War I and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that buried the Roman city of Pompeii.

PhysX will be used in the game to create new physics effects such as more realistic leaves and flower animations along with weapon and smoke effects. For the destruction of Pompeii the game will use PhysX to create realistic looking smoke and ash effects. Once agan the development team members remarked on how easy it was to implement the PhysX-support effects into Darkest of Days. The game is currently due for release in the third quarter of this year.
Lastly, the development team at Airtight Games talked about Dark Void, a third-person action game in development for Capcom. The game itself , which uses Unreal Engine 3 as its base, has the player using a jet pack for much of the game in aerial battles against the game's alien threat. In this kind of environment, PhysX not only makes for cool looking effects, but it can actually affect gameplay.

Airtight Games Dark Void team members revealed in the conference call that in addition to effects like weapons and particles, it will use PhysX to create smoke and cloud effects that can hide enemies from view. That should allow for a more tactical way to combat the aliens than what would be available normally.

Nvidia now allows PC gamers to create an SLI set up for their rigs that gives one graphics card control of the visuals and the other dedicated PhysX support, handing nothing but the PhysX hardware effects. You can designate which card is to be the PhysX card in the Nvidia control panel.

While PhysX is mostly used by game developers to make better and more realistic effects, we are still not seeing a lot of pure gameplay innovations in many of these titles. Dark Void is an exception, however, and as more developers choose to use PhysX we hope they will take the time to incorporate real gameplay into their plans. Nvidia told us to expect even more announcements of PhysX supported games in the coming months.