PhysX Owners can now get in on the action with the hot new hardware physics accelerated title: CellFactor: Combat Training from Artificial Studios and Immersion Games. All you need is a PhysX accelerator and a decent gaming rig, and you're ready to get fragging. This beta demo is both multiplayer and single player enabled with customizable bots. It includes one level for play plus Reality Builder software for creating your own levels.

Note: CellFactor Beta R36 includes a number of performance and file management improvements.

After downloading CellFactor R36, we used the built-in installer and after a while, we saw two icons on our desktop.

The final CellFactor version is expected to arrive in 2007. The game's engine would require an AGEIA PhysX card installed in order to run. Even the beta we tried warned us that it would not run if we didn't have an Ageia PhysX card on board. However, users can test CellFactor by adding "EnablePhysX=false" at the end of the game's shortcut.

The game uses HDR, that gives a huge performance hit overall. For our review, we tried to find an acceptable frame rate at 1024x768 with mostly basic visual improvements enabled. In the game options, we found the selection box where Ageia PhysX acceleration is by default enabled and grayed out, Physics acceleration is on:

We could also disable physics acceleration using the above mentioned command parameter when running CellFactor so that it operates in software rendering mode.