I have seen the future....

[weevil]

nV bought out Ageia

3dfx team's on board too

It was headquartered in San Jose, California until, on the verge of bankruptcy, many of its intellectual assets (and many employees) were acquired by its rival, Nvidia

Which is why we're in this forum not the other one, Aegia plus 3dfx, heady brew

Could we please stay on topic?

[Sazar]

Originally Posted by PeterJensen

Could we please stay on topic?

What is the topic?

Seeing the future?

Let's talk star trek in that case

[Razor1]

Originally Posted by Sazar

Crap games with implementation doesn't mean jack.

Havok still has a lead in tier 1 titles. Heck, per the graphs on the site you linked, it has the lead in the top 3 tiers while PhysX dominates in the bargain basement titles that likely see few installs.

Results are obvious enough – PhysX SDK is dominating on PC market, Havok – on console market (reasons were described in pt. 1). Also, only Havok has advanced support for various platforms – not only PC and modern consoles, but Xbox, PS2 and even PSP.

Read the article next time

If you can't read it and just looking at one graph to make a point its a pretty weak arguement.

Havok leads in Consoles, and thats it, when it comes to PC titles, they aren't even close.

Thanks to it’s free license and rich feature set PhysX SDK, preferred by small teams, is dominating PC market. Currently PhysX SDK is widely adopted by russian (mostly trash games) and korean (mostly specific MMOs) developers. Not to mention, that PhysX SDK is default physics solution for Unreal Engine 3, used in majority of UE3 based titles (Gears of War, Mass Effect, etc). Year 2009 has brought some popular games, like Dragon Age: Origins, Overlord 2 or Risen, into PhysX library.

Havok is currently best choise for AAA titles – extensive toolset , orientation on consoles, best-in-class developer support. Well-known titles of year 2009, like Uncharted 2: Among Thieves or Killzone 2 are based on Havok. Surprisingly, even Try Havok initiative hasn’t helped Havok to gain popularity at indie-developers community.

And problem is now that PhysX is also available on PS3 and PS2 is now gone, added to physX works on cellphones like the Iphone, guess what the market is going to be ?
If you look at AAA titles for the PC from a year to year basis, its pretty equal for physX to Havok in recent years, but then again, GPU physics, only one it town. Havok looses at the end, and Havok will continue to loose marketshare as long as Intel doesn't allow them to come out. Why do you think ATi is now with Bullet? What happened with Havok? Intel screwed AMD, AMD did a stupid move to promote Havok GPU physics after Intel bought them out. They should have know Intel would lock them out (well not lock them out but drop the ball because Larrebbee just wasn't up to snuff)

As of 2008 Havok hasn't been implemented as much as PhsyX and this is when PhysX came out after nV bought them. My point being, nV is doing a good job at pushing it out there, if you don't like the effects, thats up to you, and I really could care less, because others like what they see, and the potential of more is there, just takes time to get those out.

[Toss3]

Originally Posted by Razor1

http://physxinfo.com/articles/wp-con...tion_graph.jpg

yeah there is a various platform uptake chart there too

Without consoles in the mix, phsyX has more then a two fold advantage over Havok.
?

That graph is flat out wrong.

Here's the list of all of the titles currently using Havok. If you do a simple search you'll see that there are ~124 PC titles in there. All in all there's over 200.

Note here that I'm not saying in any way that Havok is better than PhysX, because clearly it isn't. Instead of saying "Havok" I could have said "physics run on the CPU".

If you want GPU only physics, why even have this discussion, because is there any game that isn't using PhysX for gpu accellerated physX?

I'm just saying that "GPU assisted physics" is a feature nvidia currently are touting as a major advantage of their cards and I'm just pointing out that that argument bares no weight at all. It's currently only being used for things that could be done on a CPU 10 years ago, but now suddenly require a gpu to run. Then they limit the performance of PhysX on CPUs to make their cards look better. See where I am going? Nvidia being the only one having PhysX is only hurting the market, not advancing it.

I would very much like to see future titles make use of the PhysX effects shown in the plethora of different demos out there, but with only one camp having access to those features I don't see it happening.

[Sazar]

Originally Posted by Razor1

Read the article next time

If you can't read it and just looking at one graph to make a point its a pretty weak arguement.

Havok leads in Consoles, and thats it, when it comes to PC titles, they aren't even close.

My bad.



So yah, Havok leads in quality games. You're absolutely right.

Physx has the lead in most overall titles apparently, but the vast majority appear to be low-end/crap games with who knows how good an implementation.

[shadow001]

One also has to make the distinction between CPU based and GPU based physics,since PhysX can run on the CPU as well,if the user doesn't have a video card that supports GPU based physX,and the game itself needs specific support for GPU based physX.


So under those circumstances,the total amount of games supporting GPU based physX drops to about 10 games over the last 2 years,so it's hardly impressive in that sense.


I really don't care about differences between PhysX,havok,bullet as long as all 3 run on CPU's,as they're pretty similar when it comes to overall capabilities,and it comes down to which one uses less CPU power for a given effect which decides the best one,and even then,it depends on the game itself and what type of effects have the developers planned for it.


Lots of variables come into it basically.

[Razor1]

Originally Posted by Toss3

That graph is flat out wrong.

Here's the list of all of the titles currently using Havok. If you do a simple search you'll see that there are ~124 PC titles in there. All in all there's over 200.

Note here that I'm not saying in any way that Havok is better than PhysX, because clearly it isn't. Instead of saying "Havok" I could have said "physics run on the CPU".

I'm just saying that "GPU assisted physics" is a feature nvidia currently are touting as a major advantage of their cards and I'm just pointing out that that argument bares no weight at all. It's currently only being used for things that could be done on a CPU 10 years ago, but now suddenly require a gpu to run. Then they limit the performance of PhysX on CPUs to make their cards look better. See where I am going? Nvidia being the only one having PhysX is only hurting the market, not advancing it.

I would very much like to see future titles make use of the PhysX effects shown in the plethora of different demos out there, but with only one camp having access to those features I don't see it happening.

You want to list out when those game came out in the market, Xbox games stopped coming out in in late 2005. You still think that graph is still wrong? If you look at 2006 and up, which is what those graphs are showing, the number of Havok titles for PC goes down pretty fast. This is when Havok was the only solid physics engine out there prior to Novedex

What are you talking about now? First you want to talk about PC only, the list you just showed me a list that isn't PC only. What do you exactly want to talk about? Because throwing a billion darts at a board you are bound to hit something correctly.

There is only one camp because ATi doesn't get off their butt to do anything, they can talk and show powerpoint slides all they want it, buts till they actually get some decent opencl and direct compute drivers and with bullet with some games, they don't have much of a choice (yeah they aren't in the greatest shape right now).

Funny thing is games 10 years ago had very little outside of collision detection based on bound box, even games 5 years ago, same old collision detection based on pre poly (acutally just more precise bound box based on skeletons), now we are doing per poly with physX, see the difference in escalation.

When you really want to talk about things like this, guys really read some basic game programming books, don't need to know the real thing and make a game, just the basics and history have how games have evoloved from a tech point of view. To me when people put out for the most part pointless arguements based on crap knowledge, guess what.........

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Razor1

You want to list out when those game came out in the market, Xbox games stopped coming out in in late 2005. You still think that graph is still wrong? If you look at 2006 and up, which is what those graphs are showing, the number of Havok titles for PC goes down pretty fast. This is when Havok was the only solid physics engine out there prior to Novedex

What are you talking about now? First you want to talk about PC only, the list you just showed me a list that isn't PC only. What do you exactly want to talk about? Because throwing a billion darts at a board you are bound to hit something correctly.

There is only one camp because ATi doesn't get off their butt to do anything, they can't talk and show powerpoint slides all they want it, buts till they actually get some decent opencl and direct compute drivers and with bullet with some games, they don't have much of a choice (yeah they aren't in the greatest shape right now).

Funny thing is games 10 years ago had very little outside of collision detection based on bound box, even games 5 years ago, same old collision detection based on pre poly (acutally just more precise bound box based on skeletons), now we are doing per poly with physX, see the difference in escalation.

When you really want to talk about things like this, guys really read some basic game programming books, don't need to know the real thing and make a game, just the basics and history have how games have evoloved from a tech point of view. To me when people put out for the most part pointless arguements based on crap knowledge, guess what.........

They don't really need to do anything when viewed in broader terms,as ATI is owned by AMD and AMD makes CPU's,which are used to run physics in games,among other things of course,and obviously,intel also has a say in the matter,since they're also primarily a CPU business afterall,and both are interested in selling the fastest and most expensive CPU's they can make to hardware enthusiats.



The other point is that i have yet to see a single user claim that at least with Nvidia's current hardware(might be different with Fermi),that they can run a game and GPU physics on the same GPU and still get acceptable performance,especially if the user in question like to play games at high quality settings,so at least for now,GPU physics are relegated to either Dual GPU cards,or multi card SLI setups,which have the extra power to pull it off with good performance.



Nvidia will have a real edge when they develop a single card with a single processor in it, that can do both workloads(graphics + physics),at high graphics quality,while still having playable performance....Until then,it's a gimmick plain and simple.

[Razor1]

Originally Posted by shadow001

They don't really need to do anything when viewed in broader terms,as ATI is owned by AMD and AMD makes CPU's,which are used to run physics in games,among other things of course,and obviously,intel also has a say in the matter,since they're also primarily a CPU business afterall,and both are interested in selling the fastest and most expensive CPU's they can make to hardware enthusiats.

And this is another area where PhysX is winning over development teams. Since PhysX isn't bound by the what CPU you use, it gives the additional benifits for nV only cards, it would be nice if it worked on ATi cards, but thats a business choice nV made, and it screwed over ATi, so what, that is their choice to make.

The other point is that i have yet to see a single user claim that at least with Nvidia's current hardware(might be different with Fermi),that they can run a game and GPU physics on the same GPU and still get acceptable performance,especially if the user in question like to play games at high quality settings,so at least for now,GPU physics are relegated to either Dual GPU cards,or multi card SLI setups,which have the extra performance to pull it off with good performance.

Great way to sell more cards right , but another note as I stated about escalation.

Lets take a simple cape flowing effect, in the past we used skeletal animation for this, to make a nice (reletively speaking for that time) flowing cape you would use around 20 bones. Now a nice looking cape would be modelled with around 200 polys or so, it get the bones to flex properly so you won't get any sharp angles or stretching and what not.

Now put that into a per poly situation, mind you the skeleton is still there for over all movement of the cape, but now the calculations just increased 200 fold because its based on the poly that was hit.

Nvidia will have a real edge when they develop a single card with a single processor in it, that can do both workloads(graphics + physics),at high graphics quality,while still having playable performance....Until then,it's a gimmick plain and simple.

Plain and simple its not a gimmick, if you don't know how much the load increased for such a simple effect, guess what happens when we are looking at much more intensive effects? It doesn't take a genius to understand this stuff.

CPU's in the past 5 years have increased in preformance 10 times or so, not much more then that, animations of physics that were based on skeletons before, now that are based on per poly, the increase is much larger, the cape example is nothing to some of the effects I've seen in some up coming games.

[Toss3]

Originally Posted by Razor1

You want to list out when those game came out in the market, Xbox games stopped coming out in in late 2005. You still think that graph is still wrong? If you look at 2006 and up, which is what those graphs are showing, the number of Havok titles for PC goes down pretty fast. This is when Havok was the only solid physics engine out there prior to Novedex

What are you talking about now? First you want to talk about PC only, the list you just showed me a list that isn't PC only. What do you exactly want to talk about? Because throwing a billion darts at a board you are bound to hit something correctly.

You were the one who took up the whole Havok vs PhysX stuff to begin with - I just said that gpu-accelerated PhysX is a gimmick and you still haven't addressed that argument which was the point to begin with. I honestly don't care what physics engine a game uses as long as it doesn't affect the game itself(which is exactly what nvidia's PhysX does).

There is only one camp because ATi doesn't get off their butt to do anything, they can talk and show powerpoint slides all they want it, buts till they actually get some decent opencl and direct compute drivers and with bullet with some games, they don't have much of a choice (yeah they aren't in the greatest shape right now).

This has nothing to do with ATI at all. They are not arguing that nvidia should give them PhysX for free. They are just sticking up for the consumers calling nvidia out on the lies they are feeding us. We don't need a gpu to run those effects currently presented in PhysX titles and that is the truth.

Funny thing is games 10 years ago had very little outside of collision detection based on bound box, even games 5 years ago, same old collision detection based on pre poly (acutally just more precise bound box based on skeletons), now we are doing per poly with physX, see the difference in escalation.

Red Faction:


Mirror's Edge:


Just to prove that you don't need a gpu to simulate broken glass. Funny how a game made in 2001 can look better than a game made in 2009.

When you really want to talk about things like this, guys really read some basic game programming books, don't need to know the real thing and make a game, just the basics and history have how games have evoloved from a tech point of view. To me when people put out for the most part pointless arguements based on crap knowledge, guess what.........

What are you talking about? No one is saying that gpu accelerated physics would be WORSE. We all know what PhysX is capable of - what we are saying is that it isn't being utilized for anything beyond what could be done on a cpu.

[shadow001]

Originally Posted by Razor1

And this is another area where PhysX is winning over development teams. Since PhysX isn't bound by the what CPU you use, it gives the additional benifits for nV only cards, it would be nice if it worked on ATi cards, but thats a business choice nV made, and it screwed over ATi, so what, that is their choice to make.


Great way to sell more cards right , but another note as I stated about escalation.

Lets take a simple cape flowing effect, in the past we used skeletal animation for this, to make a nice (reletively speaking for that time) flowing cape you would use around 20 bones. Now a nice looking cape would be modelled with around 200 polys or so, it get the bones to flex properly so you won't get any sharp angles or stretching and what not.

Now put that into a per poly situation, mind you the skeleton is still there for over all movement of the cape, but now the calculations just increased 200 fold because its based on the poly that was hit.




Plain and simple its not a gimmick, if you don't know how much the load increased for such a simple effect, guess what happens when we are looking at much more intensive effects? It doesn't take a genius to understand this stuff.

CPU's in the past 5 years have increased in preformance 10 times or so, not much more then that, animations of physics that were based on skeletons before, now that are based on per poly, the increase is much larger, the cape example is nothing to some of the effects I've seen in some up coming games.

Well,this is what i'm thinking about getting this year,being the enthusiast user that i am,and i think i'm covered for CPU power for the next couple of years at least,no matter how sophisticated physics get:





Dual socket enthusiast board,costing 600$,and can support 6 core/12 thread CPU's in each socket,for a grand total of 24 threads and with 48 GB of memory in total as a maximum and support for both SLI and crossfire,and unlike standard server boards,it has plenty of options for overclocking too.


Expensive,sure,but problem solved for a long time to come...It's an EVGA classified SR-2 motherboard btw,and it's out now.