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Give it a couple of years and I suspect that one of the graphics chip companies will buy PhysX and incorporate its technology into their GPUs. That will make a tidy sum of money for the founders of PhysX and it should mean that the technology becomes ubiquitous, which can only be a good thing for us all.

We’ll also have to wait to see how the inevitable progress in technology affects the physics bottleneck, as well as the impact of DirectX 10 and Windows Vista. Fast forward three years to 2009 and we can conservatively expect gaming PCs to run 64-bit software on a quad-core processor, with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, while the graphics card will have a unified shader architecture and four times the performance of a GeForce 7900 GTX or a Radeon X1900 XTX.

I’d like to think that we’ll all be gaming on a 720p HDTV but I suspect that many of us will be sticking with a 19 or 20in TFT on our PC, although by then we may have finally started to refer to it as a 500mm display. At that time I doubt that we’ll be complaining that exploding barrels don’t quite look the part or that we need a few more sprites to make the firefights realistic, but no doubt we’ll have other concerns, and very likely they will centre around the usual complaint that ‘the game doesn’t look realistic enough.’

Well I don’t know about you, but to my mind that’s ridiculous. Games aren’t supposed to look realistic because they are, well, games.

When you get shot in Far Cry you can slap on a medi-pack and be restored to full health. There’s no need to lie in hospital for months on end and when you’re healed you don’t have any loss of mobility or a propensity to complain that the damp in the air will bring on your lumbago something rotten.

In most first person shooters you can carry an enormous haversack of weapons and ammo that won’t slow you down and which seems impervious to water damage, so the idea that the rail gun or nail gun deals out ‘authentic’ damage is just plain daft. Instead we tend to spot when something doesn’t look quite right, so a picture that is hanging slightly crooked on a wall stands out. Look at pictures of Mickey Rourke and Joan Rivers (two celebrities who demonstrate that plastic surgery is a poor idea) and while you may not know what it is about their faces that strikes a chord, you know that something is out of kilter.

I’ll be won over by either approach to physics when I can fire a shotgun at a tree and watch the foliage and branches go flying and then drop to the ground, but I have my doubts. To the best of my knowledge there isn’t a computer model in the world that can accurately predict what will happen when you drop a stone into a muddy puddle.

We know that drops of water and mud will fly around, but predicting the exact pattern that they will form is impossible so as things stand I suspect that both Havok FX and PhysX will make games look more impressive without necessarily making them feel more realistic.

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