Lords of the Fallen (PC) - What is "NVIDIA Apex Turbulence"?

"Apex Turbulence" is a framework with its own API using DirectCompute (DirectX 11), PhysX and CUDA, for the GPU to do some advanced physics calculations through the programmable shaders.

In plain English: the developer uses the graphic card to calculate high definition smoke, fog interaction, dust, sand & snow storms - everything that needs a high amount of particles and therefore particle calculations.

Here's an article on the NVIDIA Developer Website with several video (game) examples:

https://developer.nvidia.com/apex-turbulence

This feature seems to have been the reason why some people have had game crashes on their PCs. It needs a Kepler architecture or above NVIDIA GPU. Notebooks are also not the best environment to play the latest (modern) games on highest settings, no matter what the Alienware & Co. marketing people are trying to tell you.

apex_gpu_support_enabled = false in the settings.ini disables the feature.

If you want to dig even deeper, there is a tutorial for UE3 users:

https://developer.nvidia.com/apex-turbulence-tutorials

This is all part of NVIDIA GameWorks™ which is a middleware product, providing game developers with specific development tools & libraries:

https://developer.nvidia.com/what-is-gameworks

PS: I am not working for NVIDIA nor trying to 'sell' you something. I use AMD/ATI, Intel and all sorts of GPU/CPUs. So, please, no 'flamewars' - we had those since ca. 1999.

I have moved this topic from the Game Discussion board to the PC board as I felt it was more relevant here. Can you provide some expansion to this @sethfrost to get some conversation going?

Thank you.

Just reporting in:

I bought this game yesterday and played about 2 hours of it (killed the first boss).

Game works fine on my rig with everything on VERY HIGH except AF (2x) and Shadows at HIGH.

I'm confused. Isn't this just the same thing we've had forever (PhysX?)? Or are these features not exclusive to NVIDIA-based cards anymore?

Yea its been fine for me as well but I had to put Textures on High to avoid stuttering in the outdoor areas.

Same here, what is this?

According to eurogamer, the exclusive PC apex effects actually end up hurting the games presentation in many moments. What a waste of time and performance.

@JangoWuzHere said:

According to eurogamer, the exclusive PC apex effects actually end up hurting the games presentation in many moments. What a waste of time and performance.

yeah.... its actually better to disable the apex particles on PC because the engine itself actually does VERY nice particle effects. with apex on, there are a lot of scenes that strangely just have no particles at all.

Why put AF at 2x? Going from 2x to 16x has little to no performance drop.

Well, in most game I never see the difference from a low to high AF, so I just put it on minimum to save on performance, even if minimal.

It is not exclusive like PhysX.

It even works with older games like Dark Void!