PhysX game shows promise
New game shows off Physx hardware.
We finally got around to testing out CellFactor: Revolution for ourselves this week. To recap, CellFactor is a free downloadable game designed to show-off those fancy
CellFactor is basically a straightforward fragfest, either with bots or with real players over a LAN. You can choose from three difference character types, but we spent all of our time with the Bishop character, whose psi-powers seemed best suited to trying out the advanced physics.
We definitely experienced some ooh and ahh moments while playing CellFactor. Psychically redirecting a stream of flowing, blobby lava into an enemy's face is new. We also liked the various tricks you can pull off with the plentiful objects in the game, such as gathering boxes in a floating formation in front of you and then firing them at your enemies one by one. Being able to part rubble like the Red Sea is fun as well.
We didn't conduct traditional benchmark testing with this card as that seemed fairly pointless; what would we compare it to? But we can say that we tried it in two different PCs of varying capability.
The first was a Gateway FX530XT, complete with 4GB of RAM, an overclocked Intel Quad Core Extreme chip, and a GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card (an update from
The
As to whether it's worth shelling out $150 for the PhysX card, we don't think CellFactor is deep enough. It's a good start, since it shows off what the technology can do, but we're more interested to see if any of the forthcoming PC games with announced PhysX support will implement hardware accelerated physics in a meaningful way. There's always the chance, but we have a feeling that for now, developers will simply stick to boosting cosmetic effects, rather than risk alienating potential customers by requiring a PhysX card to power a fundamental game element.