Published in Graphics

Mirror's Edge has cool PhysX and kitsch graphics

by on23 December 2008

Image

Looks like Shogo from 1998


Nvidia.com is offering a few trailers from EA's highly anticipated Mirror's edge, a title developed by Dice. Nvidia is the one that cannot wait to see this game out, as it will be the first significant game to feature PhysX. Unreal tournament 3 was the first one, but this game failed to make a big impact on the market. PhysX is also a part of strategy that Nvidia calls Graphics +, which is, of course, a graphics card used for more than just the games, e.g., PhysX or Cuda computation.

The game, according to a few sources, will ship in January and Nvidia already shared videos of how good it will be. There are a few trailers from Nvidia’s ultra fast Website and we can tell you that a few PhysX effects, including smoke and steam, tearing cloth, breaking glass effects, all look really great. We also like the smoke, particles look much better than ever before, very realistic. This is the first game that actually shows realistic tearing of cloth, flags, foils and shattering glass, and the trailers are full of these effects.

Still, at the same time, the post processing and the colors are horrible. The game finish is done in wannabe cartoon mode with too-saturated colors, high contrast, overemphasized HDR effects in non-realistic mode. It reminds me of Shogo, a game that came out 10 years ago that had a similar feel to it, and this looked great 10 years ago. I am not sure that this is the way that game should look, but this is a Japanese style game and all the colors and contrasts might be appealing to Japanese, Koreans and the rest of the Asian market, as well as cartoon lovers all over the world.

It's not that we dislike the whole cartoon theme, we're sure a lot of people will enjoy it, but we were hoping the main focus would be on realism, as this is what PhysX is all about, supposedly.

You be the judge, check it out here.
Last modified on 24 December 2008
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