PhysX

PhysX is a proprietary realtime physics engine middleware SDK. PhysX was authored at NovodeX, an ETH Zurich spin-off. In 2004 NovodeX was acquired by Ageia, and in February 2008 Ageia was acquired by Nvidia.

The term PhysX can also refer to the PPU expansion card designed by Ageia to accelerate PhysX-enabled video games.

Video games supporting hardware acceleration by PhysX can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU (if it has at least 32 cores and a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory), thus offloading physics calculations from the CPU, allowing it to perform other tasks instead.

Middleware physics engines free game developers from writing own code which implements classical mechanics (Newtonian physics) to do e.g. soft body dynamics. PhysX is one of the handful of physics engines used in the large majority of today's games.

The PhysX engine and SDK are available for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3,PlayStation 4,Xbox 360,Xbox One and the Wii. The PhysX SDK is provided to developers for free for both commercial and non-commercial use on Windows. For Linux, OS X and Android platforms the PhysX SDK is free for educational and non-commercial use. At GDC 2015, Nvidia made PhysX free with source code available on GitHub.

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2 is an action role-playing first-person shooter video game developed by Gearbox Software and published by 2K Games. It is the second game in the Borderlands series and the sequel to 2009's Borderlands. The game was released for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and OS X on September 18, 2012. It was ported to the PlayStation Vita on May 13, 2014, and released for Linux on September 30, 2014.

As with the first game, Borderlands 2 allows players to complete a campaign consisting of central quests and optional side-missions as one of four treasure seekers, "Vault Hunters", on the planet Pandora. Key gameplay features from the original game, such as online collaborative campaign gameplay; randomly generated loot, such as weapons and shields; and character-building elements commonly found in role-playing video games are in Borderlands 2.

The game was well received by critics and was a financial success. Downloadable content for the game was released, including new characters and storylines. The Game of the Year Edition of the game was released in October 8, 2013 in the U.S. and October 11 internationally, including all the previous downloadable and upgrade packs except for the new campaign. A PlayStation Vita version was released in May 2014, and was developed by Iron Galaxy Studios in collaboration with Gearbox.PlayStation 4 and Xbox One ports of Borderlands 2 and its DLC were released as part of Borderlands: The Handsome Collection on March 24, 2015.Borderlands 2 had sold over 13 million copies, making it 2K's highest-selling title.

GeForce 200 series

The GeForce 200 Series is the 10th generation of Nvidia's GeForce graphics processing units, still based on the Tesla (microarchitecture) (GT-codenamed chips), named after the inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla.

Architecture

The GeForce 200 Series introduces Nvidia's second generation of Tesla (microarchitecture), Nvidia's unified shader architecture; the first major update to it since introduced with the GeForce 8 Series.

The GeForce GTX 280 and GTX 260 are based on the same processor core. During the manufacturing process, GTX chips are binned and separated through defect testing of the core's logic functionality. Those that fail to meet the GTX 280 hardware specification are re-tested and binned as GTX 260 (which is specified with fewer stream processors, less ROPs and a narrower memory bus).

In late 2008, Nvidia re-released the GTX 260 with 216 stream processors, up from 192. Effectively, there were two GTX 260 cards in production with non-trivial performance differences.