Nvidia’s new Gameworks tech is their future of gaming

Nvidia at their Montreal, Canada event on 17 October announced five technologies that will be bundled into their new Gameworks developer offering, which is a one-stop solution for game developers looking for a single provider to help accelerate their efforts.

The features are called FLEX, Flameworks, Faceworks, GI Works, and Optix.

Gameworks is comprised of several old and new technolologies, some of them you may already be familiar with:

Visual Effects SDK
Core SDK for Geforce technologies (Optimus, etc.)
Graphics Library (documentation for architectures and features)
Game Compute Library (documentation for CUDA, DirectX, GPU compute)
Nvidia Physx SDK
Nvidia Optix SDK

Gameworks itself will all be available as plug-ins for Visual Studio, which means that game developers won’t have to shuffle around with different programs and software kits to get things to work. Nvidia’s plan is to make it as easy as possible to use any of their technology in any game.

FLEX Physics

The first big change to Nvidia’s offerings is FLEX – a new version of Physx that combines several models together to make more realistic simulations. Nvidia can now accurately simulate water bodies and it’s possible to have the virtual water simulation interact with solid objects.

This means that previous things like exploding particles, cloth physics and solid objects with different shapes all interact in a unique way with the water simulation. Nvidia’s engineers even showed that it was possible to make water balloons using their models which, while possible in modern game engines, was a very hard thing to code for previously. Having this all available a click away is a huge time-saver for developers.

Faceworks for better animations

Faceworks is also now included in Gameworks and you may be familiar with the Digital Ira demo which is capable of running on a lot of different graphics cards and scales down to Nvidia’s Tegra hardware. In fact, at the event in Montreal, the Ira demo was running on prototype Tegra 5 hardware in full 1080p resolution.

Digital Ira is more a proof-of-concept that Nvidia has been working on. Facial animations in games haven’t seen a lot of change in the last few years and the Faceworks tech allows for a much wider range of emotions and reactions from game characters. The fact that it runs well enough on Tegra hardware means that future games on multiple platforms may have this embedded – imagine seeing Trevor from GTA V screaming at Michael, but looking much more realistic while doing it.

Flameworks for realistic fire

Flameworks is a physics-based simulation applied to render more realistic fire and to make it interact with objects in a more logical fashion.

The demo Nvidia showed was a dragon breathing fire and when the flames interacted with a metal ball they whipped around it, they bounced off it and some flames interacted with the surrounding environment as well. This means that simulations for the movement of fire, like in a burning building, are more realistic, and one can attach properties to an object in a game to make it more likely to catch flame.

Smoke simulations are also included in Flameworks and you can see how, when the fire dies out in the video, the smoke hovers and then rises up into the air, eventually disappearing.

Unfortunately, Nvidia hasn’t yet figured out how to make their water simulation interact with their fire simulation. However, it is apparently similar to the technology used in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug to make a realistic, fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding dragon appear on screen.