PhysX has been used only for eye candy and no interaction on the gameplay.
But you've just discounted cellfactor without providing a reason again, not to mention ignored all the factors why devs are not able to use physx in a way that would make it mandatory. Repeating it won't make it closer to being true.
Seems that you don't have a DX11 capable card, Tessellation and DirectCompute showed more in less time being in the market that evern PhysX done, besides Batman AA, I haven't seen a game that can really impress with its physics effects using PhysX, Half Life 2 is a 6+ old game which uses CPU phisics and yet, at this time, nothing changed much.
I do actually. I have a 5870 in a gaming computer and a gtx470 in a poor man's workstation, both of which occasionally running modern titles as sort of checking in with the times. I've played mafia2 as well as some recent dx11 titles such as bc2 and dirt2. I still maintain that the physics seen in physx demos and some physx titles including cellfactor are much more impressive than any tangible difference from switching from a dx9 to a dx11 rendering method in all the games I've seen so far.
Even if I weren't equipped to judge dx11 titles, I still fail to see how it's impossible to innovate or technology-wise just by sticking to a single generation of directx like you asserted nvidia is guilty of. I see modern dx9 titles that look much better than early ones, some dx9 titles that look much better than some early dx11 titles and regardless of dx version I notice the most apparent change in visual quality when a chip maker enables a new technology rather than when microsoft ships a new release of their api.
I really doubt that, besides PhysX, most of new technologies incorporated on DX11 where ideas apported by AMD, nVidia was the one who screwed DX10 asking Microsoft to loose up a bit. DX10.1 features like Read back multi sampling came from AMD, Tessellation came from AMD, BC6 and BC7 compression schemes came from the ideas of 3Dc compression made by AMD, and Gather4 which came from the Fetch4 implementation back from the X1k era. nVidia did a lot of efforts in the OpenGL arena, but in DX as of late, nothing had come from nVidia. So without nVidia, nothing in the graphic quality landscape would had changed.
T&l, programmable shaders, gpu crossbar memory controllers, real time multi-pass bumpmapping, hardware frustrum culling, advanced MSAA, 3dvision and I'm probably not even close to scratching the surface here, were from nvidia. Some of those technologies were invented in house. And while ati did innovate big time with their first implementation of tesselation (I'd know, I still have a radeon 8500 and I wrote a paragraph about that a while ago in this thread), they did very little to make it be adopted unlike nvidia who are doing everything they can to plug physx short of a move that would directly come to bite them in the derriere.
Note that I'm not going to discount ati's contributions here at all; they were first to do a single pcb dual chip card, they also did much better dvd decoding support and again, plenty of other things I can't recall/ haven't heard of yet. However, anyone can wikipedia up a laundry list of such techs from almost all companies that were ever in a competitive position.
I'm never been one to excuse poor behavior like nvidia (if some evidence is brought up; so far I see none) but saying that, and I quote, "without nVidia, nothing in the graphic quality landscape would had changed" just leads me to believe you made up your mind to put them in a bad light no matter what because even what little I listed above all constituted a significant progression in look and possibilities of gaming during their times.
If you want inmersiveness, play Batman AA the crow's level. While everyone has a different opinion of inmersiveness, Batman AA can indulge you in that in terms of phisics effects.
Fair enough, that's your opinion which I never argued against. It's also my opinion that some (not all) effects in mafia2 were also well done and satisfy well enough of the requisites to be called immersive as well. That was what you called lonbjerg out for.
I don't have to convince nobody, this thread is about Mafia 2 PhysX On/Off video, and is up to the gamer if want to use its effects or not and if it make a difference, plus the idea of democracy and forum is to post, share opinions and have a good time, not to convince and brainwashing people.
Actually, you don't necessarily have an obligation to convince me of much even though that would help the discussion since that's just about the point of you replying to me making it sound like I'm wrong, but in this case you do need to convince people that calling someone a 15 year old kid and reporting his posts over his pointing out that, in fact, there exists a title that showed the viability of physx in creating revolutionary physics in gameplay despite the repeated assertions of otherwise is justified. And by that, I mean back up your claims with facts you candidly believe in.
It's a pretty easy thing to do to fall back to a safe stance that paints us reasonable but there's more to forums than to just state your favorite colors and calling others names; many, such as myself, come here hoping to learn something, often changing our views about subjects we previously weren't familiar with through people with experiences and insight I don't have access to. It would have pleased me to have my mind changed through learning new things by being presented evidence I wasn't aware of (I don't think anyone's been brainwashed through being shown a cogent argument yet) but there are less and less folks interested in that rather than just gathering more unqualified corroboration. If, as you claim, you never intended to be here to debate on the equal footing of being open to change your stance, then all that remains in your post were simply insulting someone for disagreeing with you, which in my book isn't exactly consistent with the spirit of "sharing opinions and having a good time", however admirable that sounds.