AGEIA Technologies, the pioneer in hardware-accelerated physics for games, today announced the introduction of the AGEIA Adaptive Physics EXtensions (APEX) Development Platform. AGEIA APEX provides game designers, developers and modders with a series of PhysX asset libraries and tools which help streamline the implementation of best-in-class in-game physics. This new offering saves engineering time and increases efficiencies throughout the development of next-generation titles, regardless of the platform, and enables designers to more directly utilize AGEIA's powerful physics engine.

The AGEIA APEX Development Platform consists of three key components: Pipeline Offload, Scaling Level of Detail System and Pre-built Verticals.

AGEIA APEX begins with Pipeline Offload, which is driven by extensive physics optimizations for the game engine that reduce the GPU and CPU bottlenecks for physics. This component of APEX is the foundation on which developers can build to fully empower the capabilities of the AGEIA PhysX processor. The Pipeline Offload component ensures that computationally extensive tasks are performed as efficiently as possible by offloading the majority of physics processing task and also some of the associated game engine code onto the AGEIA PhysX processor. APEX is initially built around Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3, one of the industry's most prolific game engines.

The Scaling Level of Detail System enables AGEIA APEX to dynamically scale the amount of physical simulation performed in the game to best utilize the processing capabilities of the system. For example, AGEIA APEX dynamically adjusts the number of particle emitters in a scene or can control the degree of fracturing in a destruction system. AGEIA APEX supports, and can scale to, single core, multi-core processor environments and systems with and without the AGEIA PhysX Processor. AGEIA APEX will also support leading console game platforms such as Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3.

Pre-built Verticals are highly tuned, physically-driven scenario libraries which enable developers to quickly enable specific advanced physics features. These scenarios have been specified and developed using production game environments and can be selected by game designers and used as-is or customized, while still fully leveraging the original engineering effort. The availability of these modules help to minimize implementation time and engineering effort needed for the inclusion of state of the art gaming physics.

"Physics is the future of gaming and AGEIA is committed to enabling as many developers as possible to deliver on that promise more quickly and effectively than ever before," said Manju Hegde, CEO of AGEIA Technologies. "We believe that all games should have great physics and every developer should have the tools to be creative in this realm. With AGEIA APEX, physics-based game design just got easier."

AGEIA APEX will be distributed at no additional charge with Unreal Engine 3.0 in early 2008. Future plans for expansion beyond Unreal Engine are also planned and will be distributed in a similar method in conjunction with other leading game engines. For more information about APEX and AGEIA's professional developer support programs please visit ageia.com/apex.