PhysX officially sucks.

[Ninja Prime]

According to polls: http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3558

IMO NV should abandon it and focus more on the graphics end.

[john19055]

I don't think it sucks ,I just would not base buying my video card on it since the game has to be coded for it.But it does work if the game supports it.I voted for (Marginal; PhysX is a bonus if a game I like supports it) like a lot of people did.

[lee63]

It hardly sucks..I use it in Cryostasis and it works great.

Just not that many games support it right now....that's all.

[CaptNKILL]

While I wouldn't sacrifice a ton of performance to get a Physx capable card, I definitely consider it a factor when choosing a graphics card.

A non-physx capable graphics card would have to be significantly faster than the competition for me to buy it. Simply because I'm the kind of person who wants the whole package if I'm going to spend money on an upgrade.

I'm not going to buy a $500 graphics card that can't show me the best visuals in the latest games if another $500 graphics card can.

If no decent games use Physx over the course of the next year then my stance will change, but I think Cryostasis alone is a game worth upgrading for.

However, if ATI puts out a card that is 20% faster than an nvidia card in the same price range I'd pass on Physx for the time being.

[Ninja Prime]

It hardly sucks..I use it in Cryostasis and it works great.

Just not that many games support it right now....that's all.

I think thats the point. They spent over a year and millions so that some crappy feature could work great in your one game. Should have spent millions and the same time making something significantly better than the 4870.

[trivium nate]

phsyx suxs!!!

[henrybravo]

What a great thread.

[crainger]

I think PhysX is ok.

[jlippo]

I wonder how much different results would be without the 43% of people who do not have physX cabaple cards. ;)

I'm quite certain that team which is responsible for PhysX implementation, doesn't take that much more resources in comparison to any other Cuda project within nvidia.

[nekrosoft13]

I think thats the point. They spent over a year and millions so that some crappy feature could work great in your one game. Should have spent millions and the same time making something significantly better than the 4870.

:headexplode:

[Dreamweavernoob]

I think thats the point. They spent over a year and millions so that some crappy feature could work great in your one game. Should have spent millions and the same time making something significantly better than the 4870.

Thats not using the noggin.

Okay, so it would mean we would have slightly faster cards on the market now.



So what.



What the PC industry needs is revolution not evolution. Whilst granted that physx is a bit gimmicky atm, anything that gets away from the drudgery of just increasing clock speeds etc is a big plus in my book.


In fairness I cant fault nvidia in this respect. At least they have been pushing 3d, CUDA, physx etc.

[jolle]

I think thats the point. They spent over a year and millions so that some crappy feature could work great in your one game. Should have spent millions and the same time making something significantly better than the 4870.
Well, they started paving the way for GPU accelerated physics.
Gotta start somewhere, now we have Havok with OpenCL support around the corner, and that might force NV to open up PhysX for everyone by porting it to OpenCL aswell, and then we´ll prolly see GPU assisted physics becoming more mainstream with both PhysX and Havok offering the feature, and can be run on any DX10 GPU.

So looking at the longterm, not really a wasted effort, not yet anyway.

[DHP]

PhysX is free, and its a bonus, so imho it doesn't suck.

Edit; at least nVidia is actually using/ supporting it in a few games. ATi has no PhysX at all atm.

[|MaguS|]

I think its worthless, We have seen the same or better levels of physics done without it... nvidia wasted their money. They should have just bought Havok...

[Butter Bandit]

I think its worthless, We have seen the same or better levels of physics done without it... nvidia wasted their money. They should have just bought Havok...

+1

[agentkay]

PhysX is free, and its a bonus, so imho it doesn't suck.

Edit; at least nVidia is actually using/ supporting it in a few games. ATi has no PhysX at all atm.

+1

Better than the vaporware that Havok/ATI promised all the years. Using PhysX and CUDA to close the gap until proper DX11/Compute Shader hardware by Nvidia is released, is a solid strategy. This approach beats the useless DX10.1 gimmick anytime.

[DeusGear]

+1

Better than the vaporware that Havok/ATI promised all the years. Using PhysX and CUDA to close the gap until proper DX11/Compute Shader hardware by Nvidia is released, is a solid strategy. This approach beats the useless DX10.1 gimmick anytime.
I think nvidia should release physics only cards for the atis side as this physics pc market divide would decimate pc gaming. Also dx10.1 is far from useless: every single game that uses dx10.1 has a huge performance jump vs dx10. DX11 has a lot of dx10.1 with the addition of tessellation and a few other things. And this has nothing to do with nvidia or ati as nvidia can gain the performance boost of dx10.1 when their dx11 cards will come out.

[walterman]

As API, i like it, but, i do not like to waste gfx power in PhysX.

I still can't run my fav games with the fps & IQ that i would like.

[Ninja Prime]

I think its worthless, We have seen the same or better levels of physics done without it... nvidia wasted their money. They should have just bought Havok...

Exactly my point. The best physics game right now? All using CPU physics, not GPU. I have yet to see anything done on PhysX that couldn't be done with a CPU. All I've seen from PhysX is throwing a bunch of random crap around on screen, somehow thats great physics?

What we need is developers to use what they have now to do something cool with it, not add GPU physics when they aren't doing anything with physics on the CPU now, not to mention detracting from the graphics end to achieve it.

[nekrosoft13]

I think nvidia should release physics only cards for the atis side as this physics pc market divide would decimate pc gaming. Also dx10.1 is far from useless: every single game that uses dx10.1 has a huge performance jump vs dx10. DX11 has a lot of dx10.1 with the addition of tessellation and a few other things. And this has nothing to do with nvidia or ati as nvidia can gain the performance boost of dx10.1 when their dx11 cards will come out.

why? you can already buy a cheap 8600 or 9600 and use it for Physx.

[john19055]

A physic card is still faster then useing the CPU as the physics or at least the reviews I have seen ,seem to show this. You can't use a ATI card and a nvidia card for physic can you.would'nt ATI have to have it in thre drivers ,like on a nvidia card ,you go to the control pannel and turn it on and select which card you want to do physics.Could ATI do this and make it work.Games would more then likely use it if it can be done on both ATI and nvidia.Instaed of just a nvidia thing.

[saturnotaku]

why? you can already buy a cheap 8600 or 9600 and use it for Physx.

And with Windows 7, it's possible to have an ATI card as your primary GPU and have an NVIDIA one dedicated for PhysX in the same system.

[Ninja Prime]

why? you can already buy a cheap 8600 or 9600 and use it for Physx.

Yarly, we need to have $2000 quad SLI with a 2000 watt PS so we can have one GPU for graphics, one for PhysX, one for AI, and one for the game engine, amirite? Despite the fact that none of them will hardly get used except the graphics one...

[walterman]

The Cryostasis tech demo was unfair for the 'cpu' users, because it was not 'multi-threaded' (and i also guess that it does not take advantage of the SSE extensions). The funny thing is that CUDA is a SIMT architecture (single instruction multiple threads), so, in theory, it should be 'easy' to port your physics kernel to a multi-core(threaded) cpu. You may think, hey, CUDA is not PhysX, but, even if PhysX is not written in CUDA, the hardware is still SIMT. Everything is a marketing thing. You can do nice physics with a multi-threaded cpu, if you want to write your code properly. Wasn't the PhysX libraries available for the PS3 developers ? (a G7x that does not support CUDA, and a 8 cores Cell cpu) ;)

[Buio]

The baseline hardware is what decides if games get GPU accelerated physics or not. We can't get good games built on hardware accelerated physics when there is no user base to buy them.

I predict that the next generation of consoles, how far away they might be or not, is a breakpoint for GPU accelerated physics integrated into gameplay. Because they function as lowest common denominator for games, where you can build games and use the GPU/CPU however you want.

Of course they will have to balance the GPU physics load versus graphics. A game built on really advanced physics creates immersion, and if that is higher than top end graphics tweaking, I say that it is worth the loss of potential graphics power.


Ps. PhysX support is being worked into SpeedTree 5.0 for future games using it (quite a lot of games do use SpeedTree).

Ps2. Also remember it was not that long since NVidia bought Ageia and PhysX. I would guess that the GT300 is the first GPU which would be really designed for GPGPU and physics acceleration. If you think current effects suck, just wait and see what they will do in the future. I think it has great potential.

Ps3. (I wish I had one) The software for integrating physics (PhysX) into games is also getting better, with the APEX tool for example. So NVidia is working on development parts too.