I know nobody really knows but is a GTX480 going to be faster then a HD5970

[CaptNKILL]

Originally Posted by shadow001

Funny,and here i though that when i played the beta of battlefield bad company 2 for instance,and can pretty much knock down anything from fences to,cement walls and trees or even bring an entire house down,and do it in any order i wish,with whatever weapon i want,that it's pretty good physics calculations going on.


And it doesn't require a GPU for physics either,it's all done with the CPU...


So your argument for GPU accelerated physics was?

What physics are you talking about? You can destroy the scenery in Bad Company 2 but it just disappears. If you blow up a wall there aren't pieces of wall laying around, there is just an explosion effect and a hole.

There really isn't that much going on in the game in the physics area.

Crysis had FAR more physics interactions without having deformable terrain.

The real benefit of Physx comes from visual effects that react realistically but don't effect the game play (since not everyone will have hardware Physx support). It has nothing to do with small numbers of large physical objects reacting because that's easy for a CPU to handle. When you have hundreds of thousands of particle effects bouncing around and interacting with the scenery though, you need to have something similar to a GPU to process it all. Water, smoke, sparks, debris... that is what physx is for.

Crysis and Flatout 2 are perfect examples of what kind of physics a CPU is good at (hundreds of medium to large objects in a scene that actually interact and effect the player's movement), but neither have realistic liquid physics, volumetric smoke or particles that bounce off of the scenery. Things like that are just too much for most CPUs, yet a GT 240 or 9600GT would barely break a sweat if used as a dedicated Physx card.

[XMAN52373]

Originally Posted by shadow001

Funny,and here i though that when i played the beta of battlefield bad company 2 for instance,and can pretty much knock down anything from fences to,cement walls and trees or even bring an entire house down,and do it in any order i wish,with whatever weapon i want,that it's pretty good physics calculations going on.


And it doesn't require a GPU for physics either,it's all done with the CPU...


So your argument for GPU accelerated physics was?

Never said you couldn't. I said it was preprogrammed prerendered crap. Meaning no matter if you use a tank, a rocket, a granade or a heavy machine gun or an air strike. Every single time you do it, it has the same "physics" effects, it also doesn't matter from which direction you do it, its still the same. BORING and NOT very realistic. Hence preprogrammed, prescripted and prerendered crap.

If a game dev is going to do something, then they should do it, not half as it.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Rollo

When I read this post, it says "ATi staffer" to me. All pretense of being an enthusiast cast aside, time to get down to business.

Maybe you are, maybe you aren't, but:

1. ATi does indeed sell GPUs every year, but that wasn't my point. My point is that since the 8800 series launched, ATi parts were inferior until the 4800 series launched. Since that day, I have read 8,023,562 posts about why NVDIA is doomed from people like you. You parrot Charlie's FUD, you make up your own, and in general post anything you can to try and damage NVIDIA's business. And like I said and illustrated with actual links to report of ATi's actual position in the market, all this marketing noise doesn't really reflect what is happening in the market.

2. ATi can't really count itself in the company of Matrox and NVIDIA, although they could be lumped in with S3. ATi sold controlling interest in their company long ago, because they couldn't cut it. Try typing "www.ati.com" into your browser's address line these days and see where it takes you. If you are an ATi staffer, I hope you guys have more to hang your hat on than NV1 days. Truth be told, if ATi wouldn't have bought ArtX's tech and got the R300 in the bargain, they probably would have joined 3DFX, S3, and Rendition long ago.

No i'm not,just old enough to have seen the birth of 3D graphics for home systems from the very start,and the bull**** marketing departments perform to make their hardware look special compared to the competition,even when direct X sucked hard and didn't support enough features compared to Glide or either OpenGL,and GPU makers always added that something extra in the graphics features dept.


But what eventually happened?....DX got better,OpenGL went by the wayside for games,and starting with DX10,all features because mandatory to support in the standard,with no possibilities to support extra features at all,so GPU makers can't make their cards add that special something in terms of graphics features anymore.


So what does Nvidia do starting in 2008?,add physics support and 3D vision,which have nothing to do with microsoft standards,in order to make their products seem special to less experienced users...Same ****,but slightly different smell when compared to what happened with the graphics standards getting unified thru Direct X10 for everybody.


And apart from the NV1,there was also the NV30,and it remains to be seen how fermi shapes up,and that Nvidia also no longer has a licence to make a chipset for intel for the i3/i5/i7 platforms,only the older prescott CPU's....Keep that in mind

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Better than your argument against it.

What you ATi guys have never got about the "open standards" line of reasoning is that it doesn't matter if open standard someday replace the proprietary standards.

The guys with the proprietary standards features still have them, and the open standards. So they're covered, while ATi buyers have to watch that Terminator Salvation video and think "Crap. When that game launches I'm going to have to play it with far less visual effects, because I bought this ATi card."

Or in a few weeks when I'm posting about 3D Surround and what it does for games, again they'll have to think "Crap. I can't do that because ATi can't figure it out."

NVIDIA owners aren't excluded from anything. (or at least they won't be when Fermi launches in 26 days) ATi owners have to mumble, "Well those effects aren't good anyway" or "Who needs AA? Someday ATi will patch it!" or "That 3d stuff is a fad, who cares what CES was all about this year?!" or "It's no problem switching the discrete graphics off and on by hand in my notebook, why would I want that to be automatic?" or "Who needs those CUDA apps, someday someone will write something for ATi!" or "Why would I need access to my multi GPU profiles, and why don't games launch with a profile".....

The list just goes on and on and on and on.

The reason ATi never gains any market share is they have no money to offer the public the features the public wants. They just cough up the same stuff year after year, but faster, and think people don't notice what modern, full featured video cards can do.

Probably the best thing that could happen to gamers would be if the Middle East finished buying AMD and actually pumped some money into R&D.

Yup,offering DX11 6 months ahead of super Nvidia,or the best performance period or using 3 monitors in gaming,using a single card,or being the first cards with directX 10.1 compliance,starting with the failed R600 CPU.....But hey,they're always broke and have no money for the features people want according to you....

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by CaptNKILL

What physics are you talking about? You can destroy the scenery in Bad Company 2 but it just disappears. If you blow up a wall there aren't pieces of wall laying around, there is just an explosion effect and a hole.

There really isn't that much going on in the game in the physics area.

Crysis had FAR more physics interactions without having deformable terrain.

The real benefit of Physx comes from visual effects that react realistically but don't effect the game play (since not everyone will have hardware Physx support). It has nothing to do with small numbers of large physical objects reacting because that's easy for a CPU to handle. When you have hundreds of thousands of particle effects bouncing around and interacting with the scenery though, you need to have something similar to a GPU to process it all. Water, smoke, sparks, debris... that is what physx is for.

Crysis and Flatout 2 are perfect examples of what kind of physics a CPU is good at (hundreds of medium to large objects in a scene that actually interact and effect the player's movement), but neither have realistic liquid physics, volumetric smoke or particles that bounce off of the scenery. Things like that are just too much for most CPUs, yet a GT 240 or 9600GT would barely break a sweat if used as a dedicated Physx card.

Oh so physics for you is not the behaviour of the graphics assets and how they react while they're getting destroyed,but also remain on the ground after they've been destroyed as well?....LOL.


If they did that,you'd have to store all that data either within the video card memory or at least,system memory and see the memory requirements for the game shoot thru the roof for both main ram and/or video card memory.

[XMAN52373]

Originally Posted by shadow001

But what eventually happened?....DX got better,OpenGL went by the wayside for games,and starting with DX10,all features because mandatory to support in the standard,with no possibilities to support extra features at all,so GPU makers can't make their cards add that special something in terms of graphics features anymore.

JC still uses OGL for his code.

Originally Posted by shadow001

So what does Nvidia do starting in 2008?,add physics support and 3D vision,which have nothing to do with microsoft standards,in order to make their products seem special to less experienced users...Same ****,but slightly different smell when compared to what happened with the graphics standards getting unified thru Direct X10 for everybody.

Yes, so much so that ATI has added the 3D part to their cards with 10.3 drivers and are STILL working on trying to get an OCL version of GPU based physics out.

Originally Posted by shadow001

And apart from the NV1,there was also the NV30,and it remains to be seen how fermi shapes up,and that Nvidia also no longer has a licence to make a chipset for intel for the i3/i5/i7 platforms,only the older prescott CPU's....Keep that in mind

Ah, that has yet to be settled in the courts. Nvidia has i3/i5/i7 based chipsets waiting to be made into silicon and sold based on the out come of that court case. Try not stating things as fact when stuff hasn't been settled yet.

[Rollo]

Originally Posted by shadow001

No i'm not,just old enough to have seen the birth of 3D graphics for home systems from the very start,and the bull**** marketing departments perform to make their hardware look special compared to the competition,even when direct X sucked hard and didn't support enough features compared to Glide or either OpenGL,and GPU makers always added that something extra in the graphics features dept.

Is that what made you decide to take up marketing? By that I mean your main contribution in the GF100 forums seems to be linking or repeating Charlie D's FUD. So are you ATi staff, or just an amateur?

Originally Posted by shadow001

But what eventually happened?....DX got better,OpenGL went by the wayside for games,and starting with DX10,all features because mandatory to support in the standard,with no possibilities to support extra features at all,so GPU makers can't make their cards add that special something in terms of graphics features anymore.

Apparently not. PhysX, 3d Vision, CUDA, AA for UE3 engine games, TWIMTBP, Optimus - all add value to the users experience that people are willing to pay for, and wait for.

Originally Posted by shadow001

So what does Nvidia do starting in 2008?,add physics support and 3D vision,which have nothing to do with microsoft standards,in order to make their products seem special to less experienced users...Same ****,but slightly different smell when compared to what happened with the graphics standards getting unified thru Direct X10 for everybody.

I imagine as an ATi employee, or fan, these things would annoy you. However, the stuff gets good reviews, and the customers like it, so I'm sure NVIDIA doesn't really care about your opinion. Proof is in the numbers shadow, and I just showed the board links to NVIDIA dominance in 2009. How do you think it's going to go for ATi in 2010 when their products are going to look so very, very plain?

Originally Posted by shadow001

And apart from the NV1,there was also the NV30,and it remains to be seen how fermi shapes up,and that Nvidia also no longer has a licence to make a chipset for intel for the i3/i5/i7 platforms,only the older prescott CPU's....Keep that in mind

Remains to be seen for guys like you, guys like me have known for a while. If I were ATi, I'd start stocking up on the blue police lights* and red pens. Sales and demand are about to take a dive.

* for those unfamiliar, B&M retailer KMart used to have "Blue Light Specials" on merchandise they were clearancing.

[XMAN52373]

Originally Posted by shadow001

Oh so physics for you is not the behaviour of the graphics assets and how they react while they're getting destroyed,but also remain on the ground after they've been destroyed as well?....LOL.


If they did that,you'd have to store all that data either within the video card memory or at least,system memory and see the memory requirements for the game shoot thru the roof for both main ram and/or video card memory.

Its hald assed no matter how you cut it. it wouldn't take up more system resources to leave the stuff on teh screen with todays being able to culling to remove what ian't seen.

[Iruwen]

Of course PhysX is great (at least in theory, I'm not a programmer).
But in its current state it is in no way an argument to get an Nvidia card, simply because there are almost no games that use it (thanks to Rollo for the backup on that) and most of the ones that do are crap.
Also, the problem is that in the games that use it, the stunning effects that result from it can as well be faked, which doesn't look as good (call it preprogrammed or static) but is hardly noticeable by a "normal" customer. The difference would be subtle. The Nvidia promo video simply didn't show any effects at all, this is of course a drastic difference. Games like Half-Life 2 are good examples of how cheap fake effects can come close to much more sophisticated algorithms. Everybody can see the difference between a scene with and without HDR at first glance. But this already gets harder with a simple bloom effect.
Plus it doesn't cost as much performance as PhysX does. My Core i7 920 / GTX 295 rig wasn't able to render Cryostasis with advanced physics enabled at what I'd call decent frame rates (also see here. Another example here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_11T0jficE
Instead of the water drops, there's nothing in the left scene. That's a design decision, not a reason to use PhysX. It's not like there wouldn't be an alternative. Or the bullet marks - nobody would ever notice this in normal gameplay if he's not an enthusiast looking for it so he can tell his fellows: look how great those sparks are!
GPU accelerated physics are a great thing: they make virtual worlds more realistic, they hopefully make it easy to design dynamic effects, they improve the overall game experience. And with the cards now being faster than any existing game requires, there's a lot of horsepower left to compute them.
But they're for sure not a reason to stick with a brand that tries to push a proprietary technology. Nvidia can make the people think that this is the case though - that's what makes them so dominant. So this would probably be more precise:

Originally Posted by Rollo

The reason ATi never gains any market share is they have no money to offer the public the features Nvidia makes the public think it wants.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by XMAN52373

JC still uses OGL for his code.

Look up the latest id tech 5 engine,which will be used with their next game called rage btw,and they've shown videos of it for the last 2+ years....You might be in for a surprise,as it can run on current consoles(they don't have OpenGL support)

Though you are right that up to their id tech 4 engine,they used OpenGL,but that was before DX10 was even officially released.

Yes, so much so that ATI has added the 3D part to their cards with 10.3 drivers and are STILL working on trying to get an OCL version of GPU based physics out.

They already have openCL drivers available,and yes they're not even beta....I know it's a shocker,and as for physics,there's plenty of options available to make them pretty good....All i know is that i have an i7 CPU right now,which as everyone knows has 4 physical CPU cores and 4 logical ones,so they're capable of handling up to 8 threads at the same time,yet most gaming software doesn't even use half of that,even in the most recent titles,so there's hardware to further improve physics available right there,hence why CPU based physics get used so much more often.


And here's the crazy part,intel are coming out with 6 core/12 thread CPU's,and not just for the very highest end either,and so is AMD with 6 core thuban processors,both of which can be used in current motherboards,and within the coming months,so in practical terms,why would i worry about GPU based physics in the short term at least?

Ah, that has yet to be settled in the courts. Nvidia has i3/i5/i7 based chipsets waiting to be made into silicon and sold based on the out come of that court case. Try not stating things as fact when stuff hasn't been settled yet.

Yup i heard that too,they state they have them in development alright,but given Nvidia's habit of talking alot and not showing much lately,and that trials like these can potentially last years and it's not something solved in weeks or months,i wouldn't hold my breath on that one...Just me though.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Rollo

Is that what made you decide to take up marketing? By that I mean your main contribution in the GF100 forums seems to be linking or repeating Charlie D's FUD. So are you ATi staff, or just an amateur?

I'm not in marketing actually,as it requires the single ability to bull**** while keeping a straight face,and source wise,i read many different ones,not just charlie's btw...I'm too old and experienced to get Bull****ted either way basically and let's just say(to put it mildly)the statements you've been making are hardly on an even keel here.

Apparently not. PhysX, 3d Vision, CUDA, AA for UE3 engine games, TWIMTBP, Optimus - all add value to the users experience that people are willing to pay for, and wait for.

PhysX---> closed standard.
CUDA--->Yup,closed standard.
AA for UE3 games----> i can force that thru the control panel anyhow,so you're BS'ing there.
TWIMTBP--->Funny you mention a marketing and developer support program as added value for end users,since there's actually been cases where TWIMTBP games actually performing better with ATI hardware....Not all of them,but a few...

Optimus is the only one that's cool,but that applies to notebook users,not enthusiasts having the most powerfull graphics cards on the market,even 2~3 of them in SLI or crossfire rigs

I imagine as an ATi employee, or fan, these things would annoy you. However, the stuff gets good reviews, and the customers like it, so I'm sure NVIDIA doesn't really care about your opinion. Proof is in the numbers shadow, and I just showed the board links to NVIDIA dominance in 2009. How do you think it's going to go for ATi in 2010 when their products are going to look so very, very plain?


Remains to be seen for guys like you, guys like me have known for a while. If I were ATi, I'd start stocking up on the blue police lights* and red pens. Sales and demand are about to take a dive.

* for those unfamiliar, B&M retailer KMart used to have "Blue Light Specials" on merchandise they were clearancing.

Ah so much talk and still nothing delivered in actual products on retail shelves,and all guys like you can say is "wait a little longer,it'll be wonderfull" till the end of time itself...You do realise that if Fermi doesn't live up to the hype you're painting it to be,you'll bee flamed to hell and and back for it,repeatedly.


At least i talk about products i already own,and guess what,in 2 days time,i'll be playing battlefield bad company,in DX11 mode and using 3 displays,while you'll be still dreaming in technicolor about Fermi's release and supposed dominance...Something to think about right there.

[CaptNKILL]

Originally Posted by shadow001

Oh so physics for you is not the behaviour of the graphics assets and how they react while they're getting destroyed,but also remain on the ground after they've been destroyed as well?....LOL.


If they did that,you'd have to store all that data either within the video card memory or at least,system memory and see the memory requirements for the game shoot thru the roof for both main ram and/or video card memory.

Swapping a 3D model of a wall with a 3D model of a wall with a hole in it and covering it up with explosion and smoke sprites is NOT physics. Its simply an explosion effect and a model changing to another model. This is what BFBC2 does.

Physx is used for dynamic effects.

Nothing that BFBC2 does has anything to do with what Physx does.

If you're going to LOL at me you should at least make an attempt to understand what I'm talking about. Uninformed trolling posts like these are the main reason I stay out of GPU discussions in the weeks leading up to a major GPU release.