While our coverage of NVIDIA’s new GTX 680 has been less than lack luster, that doesn’t mean we aren’t paying attention to it here at TheGameFanatics. The same can be said for the developers of Borderlands 2. At a recent event, NVIDIA released a tech demo showcasing the technologies that help make the world of Borderlands 2 come to life. NVIDIA’s graphics cards all use a technology called PhysX; PhysX is a real-time rendering engine that helps create things that would be labor intensive for your computers processor.
If you watch the video below you’ll see that PhysX is used to render things like water, smoke, cloth, dirt, dust, sparks, etc. These things would decrease the performance of the game if the processor had to render this while you were running and shooting things all willy-nilly. Check out the Borderlands 2 video below to see a demonstration of what I’m talking about.
Borderlands 2 NVIDIA GTX 680 Tech Demo
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Now before you go out and decide to spend half a fortune on an NVIDIA graphics card. Do understand that PhysX IS NOT used in most games. And there is no reason to go out and purchase an NVIDIA card if you already have an AMD card, powerful enough to play games like Crysis 2, Mass Effect 3, or even Borderlands for this matter, at medium to max settings.
But if you’re in the camp of wanting to play the game, the way the developers intended. There are alternative methods, other than purchasing a $499 video card. The most cost effective way, is to purchase a low end NVIDIA card that has PhysX, and use it solely for that purpose. This is a method that I considered while rendering projects in Autodesk Maya, but decided against it because of the lack of an extra PCI slot for the PhysX card on my motherboard.
