Quite an interesting beginning of GDC 2017 – NVIDIA has not only presented their newest flagship GPU, GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, but also announced several additions to the GameWorks libraries.

Let’s take a closer look.

FleX & Flow

NVIDIA FleX, unified particle-based solver, and NVIDIA Flow, an engine for simulation of smoke and fire, now both feature hardware agnostic DX12 implementation !

This is exciting news not only for gamers, but also for 3d party companies, already utilizing FleX in their products, such as Lucid Physics from Ephere.

HairWorks & Turf Effects

NVIDIA’s solution for rendering and simulation of realistic hair and fur – HairWorks – now also supports DX12, in addition to DX11 codepath (starting with HairWorks 1.3, which is already available on GitHub).

Turf Effects, an engine to simulate large amounts of vegetation such as grass, makes a reappearance with promise of DX12 integration as well.

Blast & NvCloth

Now that’s an interesting one – two new products were mentioned, namely Blast and NvCloth, which we believe are the new versions of APEX Destruction and APEX Clothing modules respectively.

Some sources are saying that those will support both CPU execution and GPU acceleration through DX12 on multiple platforms.

Moreover, accoring to the following slide, Blast and NvCloth will be available as separate packages with full access to source code.

PhysX SDK 3.4

New PhysX SDK 3.4 has also made an appearance, but it is yet unknown, if the main feature of the new engine – GPU accelerated rigid body solver – will also feature DX 12 implementaiton right now.

But judging by the direction GameWorks is going, it won’t take too long anyway.

Sources: Nvidia, ComputerBase, Kbench, TechRadar, PC-WELT