PhysX Thread

I just got my physics card today and im pretty impressed.
the demo was really fun.
whats the word on the forums?

huh? Are you talking about a graphics card? And some game demo that came with it?

No, PhysX its a new type of card which processes ONLY physics related stuff to take the load off the CPU.

Anandtech.com

ageia.com

also a good reference.

Thank you Captain Google.

I haven't yet got a PPU, but I think I will at some stage. I've been impessed with the videos. I still don't think they can get water to act like water though. Seriously though, I'm interested about the gameplay impacts this technology could have. It's all quite interesting.

Yeah methulah, I'm actually hoping that this will be a revolution in gameplay.
It could be the next big thing, or it could bomb.

personally i think this will not be a revolution... many current-gen games boasted about huge physics and are boring like hell. physics alone doesn't make a game good. maybe in a year or two this might be interesting if companies got over the physics hype and start to use physics in the correct way instead of the abusive way.

Thats true.
I'd personally like to see a next-gen physics, graphics design game not one that focuses on one or the other.

i'd like to see a game game that's not a techdemo.

Oh good god.

Yeah, yeah, some company is going to waste years making a game that takes full advantage of a technolgy that .1% of gamers have. Gee, good thinking there.

Your very sarcastic

No, we're serious. People who purchase the physics hardware indicate no sign of smartness.

There are these things that companies are forgetting about, they're um called... CPUs

Edited by (in order): leilei, leilei

Then again, I remember the days when they said the same thing about dedicated 3d graphics boards. 'Who'd spend all that money just to make it look a bit nicer?" They said. Hands up who spends more on their graphics card than they do on their CPU. Most of the PC owners here? Exactly.

They've positioned themselves in exactly the right position. Developers can use the same code library to interface with a software implementation or the hardware one, but obviously the hardware implementation lets you throw more detail into the simulation. That minimizes the development effort needed to make use of these boards. So like today there are low detail and high detail options for physics, the same will be true tomorrow. The difference is the future high detail option will be so far above and beyond the low detail version that rich folk and dedicated bleeding-edgers will have something to brag about. After that, todays physics board will become tomorrows budget physics board, and every gamer is going to have at least the budget version. After that, developers will have the opportunity to build games that depend on hardware physics simulation, because 90% of gamers will have one. Much like it's almost unheard of for a game to not use hardware 3D today.

...and you'll all be able to tell the next generation of gamers 'Oh yeah, I remember when PC's didn't come with a physics board. At first, they said it would never take off ......'

no, physics as a piece of hardware will never take off, considering they are totally closed and licensed proprietary APIs for Windows platforms only. It's not worth it for the SMALL SELECTION of titles that take advantage of it for like what, a 2 fps gain?

Edited by (in order): leilei, leilei

Who said it wouldn't take off? I would kill for realistic collision damage. Seeing your car crumple on a tree or column in a racing game would be hotness.

Meh since i spent about 300 on my X800 pro in 2004
may as well get the physx to help with some gaming
I mean just having wont hurt right?
U guys are bagging aout a peice of consumer technology that helps with fps and possibly the little split second of lag that occurs when u kick over a can in Half life 2. With this phsx card that lag will go and what awaits u is smooth gameplay
Hell Im saving up for a PCI variant of the card cos It just does sooo much good to a PC with only an AGP slot and I have no chance of switching to PCIE
So my graphics card wont lag and my physx will look better than fucking Havok

ok, nobody here really knows how the physics part is done in such cards, right? you think integrating the API into an engine will be easy? if so it would be already done. in contrast, the API is not alinged the way physics are handeled. maybe havok users might get into it easy but for the entire rest this is crap. you think physics cards boost your FPS? get realistic. the real time consuming collision detections can only marginaly be speed up using an external PPU. why are graphic boards worth the money and a physics card not? a graphic card is a 'data sink'. with other words you push data onto the graphic card and then forget about it until the next frame where you send new data. this is a one-way-pipe if you want. those cards are optimized for write access and hell slow on read access. now physics requires you to send data to the physics card ( and stall the bus with a write operation ) and then let the card calculate ( in the mean time you idle your CPU because you need the data to continue your work, and in the best case you can batch it, which is again no real gain ) and then fetch back the results ( and stalling the bus again for a write operation ). hence instead of focusing on one-way-transfer we need two-way-transfer which is slow compared to the one-way-transfer a grpahic card or sound card can provide. so this takes some time before that problem can be solved usefully. the only thing that can be accellerated is what is called 'collision response' as collision detection is so difficult to handle ( depending on the game ) that you can't simply push it onto a card.

so it's simply not yet time to waste another PCIe slot for such a card. it's nice hype-ware at the time beeing but not yet 'usefull' or worked out.

I will get it eventually when price drops, seeing as I do enjoy mucking around with physics. But until then I don't mind waiting seeing as the cellfactor demo hardly lagged on my average CPU of 2.8ghz.

That's because you don't have their card!

BlckWyerve wrote: Who said it wouldn't take off? I would kill for realistic collision damage. Seeing your car crumple on a tree or column in a racing game would be hotness.

Burnout Revenge?

CPU's are heading in such a direction where they will be so fast they will be able to do this all by themselves. At the current moment, it isn't realistic to have thousands of physics objects on screen at once and pushing all that load on the CPU, but soon it will be and physics cards will be short lived.

It isn't just about the physics objects, many of those can be handled by the CPU. However, the PPU allows one to get fluid simulation, cloth and soft body collisions going well, as well as realtime deformations of surfaces, something which the CPU would have trouble doing, even following Moore's Law (which is considered quite liberal these days), the power of the CPU when all of this becomes mainstream (which I believe it will, as Gibberstein states) will not be enough to handle multiple complex collisions involving rigid and soft bodies, fluid, deformation, cloth, multiple complex ragdolls and what have you.

However, give me a second to take it all away and I would. I want the old death animation of Half-Life style pushing boxes around back.

yeah those were awsome
Like in DoD and Call of Duty
Even Call of Duty 2 one of thise years most popular games didnt have phyics and the death animations were kick ass