I've been having this prob for a few days now. I've looked round the forums and opened a few tickets trying to find a solution. Basically my game keeps crashing at the first logo. Following one of the suggested fixes I enabled the console through the options menu in the launcher. Looking at it the crash always occurs while trying to initialize PhysX. I'm not really a computer savvy so I don't really know much about this. If anyone could help me out I'd be appreciated. :D

You running an nvidia graphics card?

We need some more details about your system, but if you are then try a different graphics driver or update your current one, the nvidia drivers have physx built in and enabled by default. You could also try disabling it from the nvidia control panel.

If you dont have an nvidia card then its something else, but without system specs id be sat here guessing all day :)

U can disable physix from the nvidia control panel, like i do. Nvidia physixs lower the performance a lot, nowadays it is just useless, so disable it. If it is not the problem, maybe u have something on the bacground, or u just have windows vista (vista can show up a lot of stupid problems on a lot of games with no reason). I cant run some program/games on vista and i really dont know wats the problem (seem to be random). If u have an old pc, maybe thats the problem, but i dont think u have an old pc -.-

also it may be useful to try and update the PhysX software as the version you have or don't in this case may be out of date, despite the chance i may get flamed for this or something similar, even if you have an ATI gpu you still need the PhysX runtimes to make some game work as they do the physics processing in software mode (processed by the cpu) not hardware mode (processed by the gpu). Anyways give updating them a try and see how it goes. If you need a link to the PhysX update let me know and i shall PM you with the link ok (not sure if we are allowed to post links to nvidia here or not so not taking the chance).

Depending on your gpu or if you have a dedicated physx card thats completely wrong, only on low end gpu's could it lower performance. A lot of engines still use physx libraries so to say its useless is far from correct.

As said though, without system specs from the op, anything we post is just guess work right now...

First off, thank you all for replying :D. I tried doing what you guys said. I went the to NVIDIA control panel thingie but I couldn't find the option to turn off PhysX. So I thought maybe my driver needed serious updating. However, it seems like it was already up-to-date. So then I downloaded the PhysX software just in case. My specs are:
NVIDIA GeForce 8500 GT
Quad Core 2.56 GHz
And I'm using XP.
If any additional information is required then please let me know and I'll post it up, thanks again :D.

P.S. CO was working like a charm before this recent update :(

On the last driver updates, nvidia fixes a lot of issues with physix, but physx dont show anything that u can see without it, so its better to have physx always disabled lol. U dont have the disable option on the control panel for physix?? it should be located on the third option from the 3d configuration section.

PhysX is just an API (to handle physics computations, such as the trajectories of pieces of debris that you can kick around), and if the game tries to initialize it, then it certainly needs it in order to run. PhysX can run on a processor or a recent Nvidia video card (but not ATI, Intel, or older Nvidia cards). This game is heavily video card bound, and doesn't use the processor much, so if you had an option, you really should have the processor handle PhysX computations.

But you probably don't have that option. Most games that use PhysX don't allow it to run on a video card, and if this were an exception, Nvidia would probably stick it on their list of games with GPU acceleration for PhysX. Nvidia is trying to push this as a reason to get people to buy their cards, but very few games use it, in part because most gamers don't have a system that can handle it. Furthermore, if a game is already pushing a video card to its limit while the processor sits there half idle, offloading more things from the processor to be computed on the video card is a dumb idea.

Quaternion, physx ALWAYS work on gpus, not the cpu. Only if u disable it u can tell the cpu to do all the work. Physx is a gpu advantage. And all games will try to find the physx active on the gpu on first place.

When we talk about "disabling" physx it means that physx is still active, but the work passes to the cpu. Enabling physx tells the GPU to do all the work.

PhysX will not run on any ATI card, Intel integrated graphics (actually, "run" on Intel stuff is something of a misnomer), obscure graphics cards from VIA, SIS, or Matrox, or even older Nvidia cards. And it won't even work on a modern Nvidia card if it detects that the system also contains an ATI card. It will run on any modern processor, however.

There are a hundred or so games that use PhysX. Nvidia only advertises 16 games as supporting GPU acceleration of PhysX. And that's not just picking the most popular games, either. It includes some games noted mainly for being obscure, awful, and supporting GPU acceleration of PhysX. It includes a few extra levels made by Nvidia for one game mainly to show off what PhysX can do. If every game that uses PhysX at all can run it on a GPU, why doesn't Nvidia give a much longer list, or at least include the more popular games that make minor use of PhysX?

The point of running PhysX on a GPU is if a game wants to do things that are too computationally intensive to run on a processor. Video cards are far superior to processors in the same price range (well, excluding discrete cards that are basically integrated graphics for a system without integrated graphics) at extremely parallel computations, and can handle far heavier physics computations than a processor.

That's great if your processor is running at 100%, while your video card sits mostly idle. That's not the case with most games, though. Many games push the video card as hard as it will go while leaving the processor half idle. On my system (with a Radeon HD 5850), the video card gets 100% utilization while playing Champions Online, while the processor gets about 25%. It's not just this game, either; when I play Guild Wars, the processor decides it is idle and clocks down to save power--without hurting game performance. To move more of the computations from the CPU to the GPU would only slow things down.

And even that assumes that the computations could easily be shifted, which isn't the case. In order for an Nvidia card to do PhysX computations, it has to completely stop rendering stuff on the screen to do PhysX computations for a while, and then stop with the PhysX computations to return to rasterization and what not as necessary to draw things on the screen. I'm not sure how long the transition takes, but Nvidia is claiming that one of the big advantages of their upcoming Fermi cards is that it can switch back and forth ten times as fast as their cards that are on the market now. That hurts your frame rate for obvious reasons. You can get around that by having multiple GPUs, one for doing 3D rendering and the other for PhysX, but that's expensive, doesn't affect gameplay a bit, and doesn't do anything at all except heat up your case for the overwhelming majority of games.

It would only even be desirable to let the GPU touch PhysX computations in Champions Online if someone has a computer with multiple GPUs in SLI and a very weak processor (basically, single core or Atom). If the game enables PhysX on a GPU by default, that would be shockingly bad programming. I'd be surprised if Champions Online allows PhysX to be handled by a GPU at all.