After Epic's Unreal Engine 4 and Unity 5 game engines went "free,"with their source-codes put up by their makes for anyone to inspect freely, NVIDIA decided to join the bandwagon of showering game developers with technical empowerment, by putting up the entire source-code of PhysX 3.3.3, including its cloth and destruction physics code, on GitHub. The move to put up free-code of PhysX appears to be linked to the liberation of Unreal Engine 4 code.

NVIDIA PhysX is the principal physics component of Unreal-driven game titles for several years now. There's a catch, though. NVIDIA is only freeing CPU-based implementation of PhysX, and not its GPU-accelerated one, which leverages NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA GPU compute technology. There should still be plenty for game devs and students in the field, to chew on. In another interesting development, the PhysX SDK has been expanded from its traditionally Windows roots to cover more platforms, namely OS X, Linux, and Android. Find instructions on how to get your hands on the code, at the source link.

Today marks the North American release of Thief, the second AAA game title touted to support Mantle, AMD's ambitious Direct3D alternative. We have also seen some heavy marketing for how TrueAudio will make the game more awesome. Unfortunately it isn't launching with out of the box support for either technology. Eidos has Mantle and TrueAudio support "scheduled for March".

Thief is part of AMD's Gaming Evolved ecosystem, which puts it in AMD's inner circle of developer support. The only other studio and game that boasts of the same, which is in the market, are DICE and Battlefield 4. Based on a heavily modified Unreal Engine 3, Thief will run DirectX 11 out of the box.

Epic Games' Fortnite will be the company's first game to take advantage of Unreal Engine 4. Debuted at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, the cartoony action title is being described as "a co-op sandbox survival game," with building at the core of the game. "Everything you find allows you to build and improve your structure," producer Tanya Jessen told an audience at a Comic-Con panel. Given that no current console can run Unreal Engine 4, the game will be exclusive to PC. According to The Verge, Epic's Cliff Bleszinski told the audience: "This is a PC designed game, shipping exclusively on the PC."

Fortnite will be available in 2013.

Get this - Epic Games is working on a PC-exclusive. This teaser was released by Cliff Bleszinski and Mike Capps of Epic Games, at PAX East. "We might be working on a PC-only title," said Bleszinski. "Let me say that again: we are working on a PC game," Capps added. Capps told Joystiq that the project is currently underway, and that Epic Games intends to keep it PC-exclusive. This fits into the scheme of recent developments at Epic Games. Epic unveiled its latest Unreal Engine 4, with demos that made the most bleeding-edge PC hardware sweat, and so it is only apt that the first game will serve as a technology demonstrator, and will probably offer jaw-dropping visuals that make use of the resources today's gaming PCs can expend.

US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and other US government agencies, licensed the Unreal Engine from Epic. Unreal is one of the most popular cross-platform game engines in the industry, and United States, through various agencies will use the engines in "serious games", games designed to simulate situations such as crime scenes, encounters, casualty treatment, for the agents to learn to deal with. While the full financial details of these deals were not disclosed, the deal with FBI Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) earned Epic around US $10 million.

Epic Games, Inc. announces its participation in the Game Developers Conference (GDC) to be held March 5-9, 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Epic will host press sessions and meet with developers and partners of its award-winning Unreal Engine technology in Business Suite 800, West Hall, at GDC 2012. In addition, Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski is set to host the Game Developer Choice Awards, and a dozen senior members of Epic's staff are scheduled to speak at the conference.

NVIDIA today announced the latest consumer GPU based on the NVIDIA Fermi architecture, the GeForce GTX 580, which has been reengineered from the transistor-level up to deliver increased power efficiency and performance over previous generation products.

The GeForce GTX 580 GPU delivers the world's fastest performance for DirectX 11 (DX11) games, and support for NVIDIA 3D Vision, Surround, PhysX, SLI and CUDA technologies, further entrenching GeForce-based PCs as the most robust gaming platforms in the world. The combination of an innovative vapor chamber thermal solution and new architectural enhancements make the GTX 580 the fastest and quietest GPU in its class, delivering an increase of up to 35 percent in performance per watti, and performance that is up to 30 percent faster than the original GeForce GTX 480.

Epic Games recently announced a partnership with GameSpy. This means that Unreal Engine 3 is about to get a serious amount of multiplayer features. Unfortunately, only PS3 and PC versions of Unreal Engine 3 will have access to these benefits, as the Xbox 360 version is already managed by Xbox Live. According to the press release, Unreal Engine 3 licensees now have access to four new features:

• GameSpy "Matchmaking" makes it easy for gamers to find suitable opponents effortlessly.
• GameSpy's "Comrade" in-game middleware enables seamless in-game to out-of-game community features, such as instant messaging.
• GameSpy's "Sake" allows developers to store data online, letting gamers build player profiles and maintain game statistics.
• GameSpy's "ATLAS" is an advanced statistical system for dynamic leader-boards and tournaments within the game and on the internet.

Unreal Engine 3 licensees will also have access to any and all new features GameSpy integrates into Unreal Engine 3.