Before leaving the South Hall we dropped by the dell booth for a final Look at Crysis. This was the first playable demo we have seen of the game, and it was pretty impressive. The game looks incredible, and the motion blur that you see with every movement makes it phenominally realistic. The only problem we noticed with the game was that the extremely high-end Dell H2C XPS seemed to be having a pretty hard time running it. This shouldn't be a huge problem by the time the game comes out, but it was interesting to see such a high end system struggling.


Our final stop of the day led us back to the Sands expo to the AGEIA briefing room. While walking through the area we were surprised to see Manju Hedge, the CEO of AGEIA candidly walking around. We introduced ourselves and it was nice to put a face to the name of the person we interviewed a few months back about the present and future of AGEIA and gaming physics. Manju invited us into a room that had several demo systems set up and showed us their latest press presentation. From what we saw in the presentation, it looks like AGEIA is going to have one hell of a 2007. Many really impressive completely PhysX integrated games are set for release in 2007, and more PhysX game patches are due out soon as well. Unreal Tournament 2007 will also have PhysX integration in tandem with the Unreal 3 engine and promises to be a game for the ages.


The other game Manju was really excited about was Warhammer – Warmonger. Warmonger will be the MMORPG version of Warhammer and is scheduled for release this year. AGEIA proved they could do MMORPG style games correctly when Autoassault hit the scenes a while back. There was a playable alpha release of CellFactor: Revolution on hand, and we can tell you that that game is going to be a big hit. The physics character in the game, Bishop, makes it so incredibly interesting that we can’t imagine it not being a huge success.


Beyond software, we spotted a PCI-e 1x version of the PhysX card. The particular card we saw was manufactured by MSI, but from what Manju told us, BFG and ASUS will remain the two primary manufacturers of PhysX hardware. There were also three external PhysX card applications. Behind the Dell notebook that was playing the CellFactor: Revolution demo was a small box that contained a PhysX card. This box connected to the computer via an ExpressCard connection which operates at PCI-e x1. This allows notebooks to have the advantages of a dedicated physics processing unit. This dell unit was only one of three, the ASUS XG Station was amongst the other two.