PhysX and APEX Confirmed Features on PlayStation 4

In the world of games development PhysX and APEX are big business and while the PlayStation 4 may sport AMD hardware, many games developers rely on Nvidias API to create their titles. Nvidia has announced that they will officially support the Sony PlayStation 4 and that it will be bringing both the Nvidia PhysX and APEX SDKs (software development kits) to the system.

Of course since the hardware is AMD based, we still don’t know how it will actually run and it will be interesting to see how the features are integrated, but as strange as it sounds to do such a think given the hardware on offer, I think its great that developers have the choice of both Nvidia and AMD based SDKs to get the best out of their games and of course, their existing game engines and development tools.

Both PhysX and APEX are vital tools for creating collision detection, the simulation of rigid bodies, cloth, fluids, particles and many more objects in a digital environment. Sure its unclear “how” they will do this on AMD hardware but Nvidia have been quick to point out that their software has been designed to run on a variety of CPU architectures, which can be accelerated by any CUDA enabled Nvidia GPU (Series 8 and above). Its really not impossible to achieve, given the broad variety of PC hardware that is on the market, the SDK needs to be highly flexible anyway, so tailoring it to the APU hardware of the PlayStation 4 could be achieved either directly or via emulation.

Sure Nvidia will ideally want their software running on Nvidia hardware, but it also won’t want leaving out of the deal. In today’s financial climate its becoming more apparent that Sony don’t have exclusive hardware with their next console, given that its using the next-gen Jaguar cores that AMD will be using in future APUs of their own, similar in design to certain aspects of the PlayStation 4, yet its also clear than AMD don’t have exclusivity in how Sony use the AMD hardware and its likely those terms have been relaxed to enable both AMD and Sony to essentially make more money, such as by adding support for Nvidia PhysX.