The next release of Emergent's Gamebryo, scheduled for this fall, will ship with the NVIDIA PhysX engine directly integrated into the platform, representing a significant step in Emergent's goal of transforming the Gamebryo engine into a single, integrated framework of game production software and design tools that developers can use to create any type of title on any platform. As a result, developers will be able to accelerate development cycles and spend more time making their games more lifelike with dynamic, real-time environments.

Gamebryo has been fully optimized for development on Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC and Wii, and was recently selected as the development platform for the next-generation console titles Civilization Revolution by Firaxis and Splatterhouse by BottleRocket. Gamebryo is also being used by EA-Mythic for its upcoming game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning as well as Divinity 2: Ego Draconis from Larian Studios.

Emergent's CEO sees this agreement as a major milestone in the next generation of game development. He views NVIDIA(R) PhysX technology and Emergent's Gamebryo as a natural fit both strategically and technically.

"More than becoming the standard for creating immersive games, NVIDIA is as dedicated as Emergent to delivering the tools, runtimes and technologies needed to radically improve the state of development," said Geoffrey Selzer, CEO, Emergent. "Both companies are committed to platform agnostic, flexible modular solutions that harness the power of multi-core, multi-threaded development. With NVIDIA's deep support for these values, we will offer the industry the most powerful, flexible, and easiest development environment available to push the edge of video game technology and creativity."

The NVIDIA PhysX development solution consists of a robust physics engine, API, and middleware designed to give developers and animators unprecedented creative control over the look of their final in-game interactivity by allowing them to author and preview physics in real time. PhysX technology works across all major gaming platforms, including Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, and the PC, and can be accelerated by both the CPU and any CUDA(TM) general purpose parallel computing processor, including NVIDIA GeForce(R) GPUs.

"We are delighted to be building a fusion of our PhysX technology and the Gamebryo engine," said Roy Taylor, vice president of content relations at NVIDIA. "The combination will provide developers a unique platform for introducing the world to their creative vision and technology innovation."