PhysX on monday

[Ellester]

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751

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best article yet, thanks

[metadigital]

Yeah, well, back to the actual topic.  Close to zero interest, not to mention a few stories on the 'net of serious slowdowns.

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The UT3 engine will utilize it (and that means just about every game, because nearly every current commercial game uses the current Unreal Tournament 2 Engine).

DirectX 10 will absolutely benefit AGEIA, NVIDIA, and ATI. For physics on GPU implementations, DX10 will decrease overhead significantly.

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Looking at the average framerate comparisons shows us that when the game is GPU limited there is relatively little impact for enabling the higher quality physics. This is the most likely case we'll see in the near term, as the only people buying PhysX hardware initially will probably also be buying high end graphics solutions and pushing them to their limit. The lower end CPU does still have a relatively large impact on minimum frame rates, however, so the PPU doesn't appear to be offloading a lot of work from the CPU core.

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As of now, the PhysX SDK has been adopted by engines such as: UnrealEngine3 (Unreal Tournament 2007), Reality Engine (Cell Factor), and Gamebryo (recently used for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, though Havok is implimented in lieu of PhysX support). This type of developer penetration is good to see, and it will hopefully provide a compelling upgrade argument to consumers in the next 6-12 months.

 

wikipedia

Available in Spring of 2006

• Bet on Soldier: Blood Sport
   
  
• CellFactor
   
  
• City of Villains
   
  
• Gunship Apocalypse
   
  
• Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends
   
  
• Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter
  

Future Titles

• 1944 D-Day Operation Overlord
   
  
• Alpha Prime
   
  
• Arena Online
   
  
• Crazy Machines 2
   
  
• Dogtag
   
  
• Eye of the Storm
   
  
• Fallen Earth
   
  
• Infernal
   
  
• KARMA
   
  
• Loki
   
  
• Sacred II
   
  
• Unreal Tournament 2007
   
  
• Vanguard: Saga of Heroes
   
  
• Warhammer Online
  

[WITHTEETH]

So Oblivions has no support, and will not have any support for the PhysX SDK, only its unmodified engine does? That kind sucks...

 

Cell Factor looks interesting, and UT2K7 is the reason Ill get it PhysX after Vista comes out. :cool:

[Dhruin]

Nope, still not that interested. That's not to say it won't be successful or even market standard. Call me when they start working on improving the core gameplay rather than glitz.

 

On performance, I don't pretend to be across the issues but this sort of thing seems to be fairly common as far as I can tell.

 

Of the titles listed, only a couple are of vague interest to me -- not to say that many others aren't very excited.

 

Sacred 2 is an interesting example...despite liking the original somewhat, I could write a lengthy diatribe on it's flaws and the lack of physics ain't one of them. I would posit that this will simply draw developer time to something peripheral rather than working on the core gameplay. Note that they sold a truckload of product - so plenty of people probably disagree with me.

[alanschu]

Optimistically, well done physics does lend itself to more gameplay improvements than any further graphics improvements at the time.

 

An important step on making a more interactive and immersive game world IMO.

[metadigital]

Nope, still not that interested.  That's not to say it won't be successful or even market standard.  Call me when they start working on improving the core gameplay rather than glitz.

 

On performance, I don't pretend to be across the issues but this sort of thing seems to be fairly common as far as I can tell.

 

Of the titles listed, only a couple are of vague interest to me -- not to say that many others aren't very excited.

 

Sacred 2 is an interesting example...despite liking the original somewhat, I could write a lengthy diatribe on it's flaws and the lack of physics ain't one of them.  I would posit that this will simply draw developer time to something peripheral rather than working on the core gameplay.  Note that they sold a truckload of product - so plenty of people probably disagree with me.

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From the overclockers' forum, to which you linked:

Whats wrong with just using the cpu, which game overloads the cpu so much that we need a special card now

It's not so much about overloading the CPU, it's that the PPU can create faster calculations of physics than a CPU. The CPU uses a standard logic for calculations whereas the PPU uses a specialised logic which will calculate more faster the physics effect.

 

The additional benifit of a PPU is that the core output will purely be dedicated to the physics whereas CPU's are load-balancing between other things. (such as active programs/OS/and everything else)

 

Although im no fanboy of PPU, it has it's benifits. But to be honest the downside of PPU is that it runs on a PCI slot, which means that there is a three way communication happening(cpu/gpu/ppu) at a fair rate(nothing great - although I wonder how well PhysX works on a PCI-X slot? ). Whereas, a HavocFX solution, which would be running on a graphics card will just have a two way comms between the CPU and graphics card. The obvious effect of having PhysX in the system has been the poor fps experienced by everyone (which has been demonstrated by everyone who posted here with PhysX in their system). Having said that, I can't vouch that the fps will not be reduced when HavocFX gets implemented with the graphics card...maybe it will be the same like the PPU because of the increased amount of calculations it is doing. Only time will tell im afraid

 

Let's hope we can see some more results from testing with PPU to see the full scale benefits of having one.

 

____________________________________________________________

Gigabyte 8N SLi Quad Royal nForce4 / 3.4 GHz Dual Core (950)/ LG775 Fatal1ty fan(Zalman FS-C77)/4GB DDR2/ XFX 7800GTX/ Thermaltake 560w PSU/ Thermaltake Romeo Xaser III Casing/3 x 120GB SATA/1x 80GB IDE/SAMSUNG DVDRW

^ Jealous of his setup!

 

Part of the issue is (so I have read) that the PPU automatically uses the highest quality graphics settings, which can cause the slow-down, too.

 

Still, to answer Fulcrum's question: Rome:Total War is a CPU-limited game (rather than GPU-limited), although it doesn't support the PhysX card, and won't (to my knowledge): but then again Medieval Total War 2 might ...

[Fenghuang]

Optimistically, well done physics does lend itself to more gameplay improvements than any further graphics improvements at the time.

 

An important step on making a more interactive and immersive game world IMO.

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Hell yes. Realistically moving/looking foilage in a game like Far Cry or the jungle levels in any of the Splinter Cell games would've been sweet.