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Infernal


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ESRB rating: Mature ESRB: Blood,Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: Eidos
Genre(s): Shooting
Home Page: http://www.infernalgame.com
 






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By: Jarno Kokko May 24, 2007

Oh my! It actually uses PhysX hardware for something

When I installed Infernal, it installed Ageia's PhysX SDK, implying that it uses the libraries for physics calculations. While this doesn't automatically mean that the game actually supports a PhysX card, in the case of Infernal there is a difference if you have one such "physics" card installed.

PhysX card disabled - barrel goes pop with some debris.
With a PhysX card, you get some wine spilling from the barrel (that pink stuff) - and yes, it looks better in motion than in a still picture.

Unfortunately, the "support" translates to a few extra visual effects that don't really add anything to the game. As a bonus, you will get a performance hit, which can be up to 20%. We tested PhysX performance using an AMD Athlon 64 single core, running at 1GHz, with an Get it! ATI Radeon X700 Pro to ensure maximum visible benefit from offloading physics to the card. Results indicated that Infernal doesn't actually offload anything from the CPU and only uses the card for extra eye candy. We noticed a drop from average of 37fps to an average of 30fps when the PhysX card was active and we were blowing up barrels of oozing liquid for a several minutes. The drop is not that noticeable on high end systems, where PhysX card is most likely to appear, but this does prove that once again there is no performance benefit, and the visual benefits are very minor. Some liquid, a bit better flame effects and explosions, but nothing remarkable.

They just keep coming and the corpses keep piling up...
Pile of barrels + big gun = nice physics.

The PhysX libraries are still put to good use even without the hardware though - enemies fall down convincingly, react properly to shots hitting different parts of their bodies and fly around nicely when a grenade goes boom. They do appear quite spineless when dead, sometimes ending up in unnatural poses, but that's a very common flaw with ragdoll physics and it doesn't really happen that often - nine times out of ten the system works and characters move properly. Animation in general works well too but there are some moves that are appear stiff, such as using the ability to peek out of a cover and shoot.




 

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 Games: Infernal
 News: Infernal Review   Mar 02, 2007

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