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2K Games, EA hop on the PhysX bandwagon
- Thread starter helmutcheese
- Start date
People said that the PPU chip should be part of the mobo chipset or included on the gfx card when the PPU first came out & as we can see now the PPU chip is not needed at all & should have been implemented on the GPU from the start then no gfx vendor would own it, it would be a even playing field from the start & may of seen more progress by now & good for the consumer but as i have said many times.. the consumer comes last as they wanted to sell the PPU cards & chips.
Nothing wrong with Q3, what is wrong is you implying that users who are not PhysX capable can not play anything more advanced then Q3.
Take a look at cryostasis and how cards without hardware physics acceleration perform... might not be the best game ever* but its the shape of things to come... my point might have been put more dramatically sure.
* But tell me the bits like pushing barrels into water and the guy throwing barrels onto the sheet wasn't nice to watch. The water could have done with more work tho.
* But tell me the bits like pushing barrels into water and the guy throwing barrels onto the sheet wasn't nice to watch. The water could have done with more work tho.
Seen it all before with out PhysX & the last time i checked there was more games in development with out PhysX than with.
Final8y said " Seen it all before with out PhysX & the last time i checked there was more games in development with out PhysX than with."
That's starting to change, look how many studies have moved to PhysX. THQ have just joined in http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=13278
PhysX could now be the most used physics engine for games in development.
As for seeing it all before I don't believe you. If you have seen it all before can you show us older none PhysX games with 3d liquids that flow into cracks and around 3D objects? Liquids that form 3d puddles based on the other liquids flowing about, not fake puddles.
first few seconds look at the floor with the crack, very impressive how the water flows down and into the cracks.About 5 mins in doesn't look right though. Its good how the water flows around the tools but it looks wrong. As for the cans being thrown into the water it looked to me like the water was 3D not the normal fake flat waster most games have. Look a the way the water ripples when the cans hit.
That's starting to change, look how many studies have moved to PhysX. THQ have just joined in http://gameinfowire.com/news.asp?nid=13278
PhysX could now be the most used physics engine for games in development.
As for seeing it all before I don't believe you. If you have seen it all before can you show us older none PhysX games with 3d liquids that flow into cracks and around 3D objects? Liquids that form 3d puddles based on the other liquids flowing about, not fake puddles.
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I have 60+ plus games & none of them are from THQ or 2K
If the fakes look just as good then the fakes are all that is needed & the avg snooker game algorithm replacing the balls with water.
But the fakes don't look anywhere near as good. Yes a lot of games don't use PhysX but now it's looking like more games in development use PhysX then any other physics API. Regularly we are now getting more and more of the big developers announcing the use of PhysX. That's 3 big developers this month alone and all the others that started to use it like Bioware and Gas Powered Games. It looks like all the people who said Physics is going die and Nvidia will kill it are wrong. Nvidia seem to be pushing for PhysX even harder then most of us expected.
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Not that big on the PC seeing as i don't have any of there games in my collection besides EA.
And the biggest hits have not come from any of them.
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I didn't See Bioware mentioned in your post
And the Sims are going to use PhysX
Oh i do have one 2K game Bioshock & one PhysX UT3 ..funny i have only played both for less than 20min a piece & nether of them install at the moment.
One Bioware game MassEffect.
Not really a huge percentage of my collection.
And games just being published by them & not developed by them does not count.
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If they want that to be anything more than a paid for NV demo don't count on it either looking like that when it gets released, or requiring hardware physics for anything more than few comedy mercury styled water effects. I find it a bit worrysome that so many appear to be welcoming what could herald a return to high pricing and stagnation of hardware with open arms, physics NEEDS AN OPEN STANDARD FREE FROM THIRD PARTY INTERFERENCE. PhysX is great in principle, but I cannot be the only person who sees it will be used as a lockout against other vendors? I've said my piece on this across a few threads and am getting tired of repeating myself, but believe this. If in a years time we are back to paying loltastic prices for Nvidia cards because they are the only ones that either run PhysX or run it at an acceptable pace due to them controlling it I will be certain to pop along for a game of 'I told you so'.
As for the guy tossing EA and Bioware around, I'll see those and raise you Valve and Blizzard.
In 4-5 month unless PhysX is running on ATI hardware then little will change than what we are seeing now with tacked on candy.lol I see these same discussions with the same 2-3 viewpoints going on on several different forums including [H], etc.
Unfortunatly it'll be 4-5months at the earliest til the swing in opinion but I'd love to be able to say told you so.
And lets just say in 4-5 month time our view points change, what good will it do for many who don't have the hardware.
You keep going on as its the users fault for the slow progress of PhysX.
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Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
Problem being, Bioshock was HAVOK not Physx, and was widely complemented on its water and how good it looked. Bioshock 2 will be based on the same engine and has been in developement for a LONG time now and the chances of it switching are almost non existant. Masseffect doesn't use PPU hardware(afaik, it runs completely fine without anyhow), just the software, same as most Physx stuff. theres a massive difference between using an easily obtainable pre writen physics engine rather than write your own, and putting in extra effects that require hardware to run, its night and day, one has NOTHING to do with the other.
LIkewise, EA and 2k have only stated they will use physx, NOT physx hardware. Also look at the titles EA and 2k actually develope themselves, rather than distribute or have a 3rd party company under their banner but those companies won't remotely be effected. Basically Sims, Spore and all the sports franchises(which are barely bought for PC and are 99% console based and utterly utterly crap). 2k have a bunch of film tie ins like Iron Man which are widely slated and almost nothing "good" they make is made directly by 2k.
So inessense these two companies have stated they CAN use the physx software or hardware in upcoming games. I don't see anywhere that all of the companies releasing games under the EA banner will use physx hardware, or software.
Bioshock is, again, not really 2k, but a 3rd party company that wasn't part of 2k when Bioshock launched, but now is but still operates as a 3rd party company.
Sims, hardly needs fantastic physx and isn't exactly a hardware hog, none of their sports games are intensive(or even slightly good) and Spore, well thats long gone and again, poop.
So the announcement add's up to nothing remotely significant. Several generic titles that sell badly and aren't graphically demanding MIGHT use the physx software or hardware, HUGE NEWS.......... I think not.
Pottsey, I don't really want to get into it again but, the vid you linked to unsurprisingly says, TECHDEMO. I've yet to see any of the liquid or material effects to the quality shown, say on the vids on Ageia's old website, or their techdemo's in a real game. Every implementation of heavy PPU effects is highly limited and ends up being the focus. IE Mirror's edge, spent all the time on a few banners that ripple in the wind, and forgot, gameplay, story, playability, game length and basic collision detection that makes jumping a joke in many parts of the game, and jumping animation, in a game based entirely on jumping.
IF the incredibly detailed power hog effects get slipstreamed into a REAL game of real length that isn't essentially a tech demo, i'm actually for it. I don't begrudge more realistic effects, I just haven't seen them yet. I see them as such a design time hog that in 4 years or so(when did Ageia form? I really don't know) I've only seen them in games that sacrifice LOTS to get them in, even then I've not seen any benefit.
I want gameplay, design, story, fun to be primary and physx to be an addon ONLY IF the rest is sorted, so far, every physx implentation is based on Physx stuff, then if theres time left, story, gameplay, fun, etc, and its failed at every turn IMHO so far.
It could simply be that its too complex, people aren't good with it, bad developers or terrible tools mean it simply takes too long to intergrate into the better longer design time games, fairplay then its not bad, its just to hard to use. But that still makes it next to worthless if the best developers in the world can't use it in their games for any real benefits as its too hard.
Then you have to use a little common sense. Is a Physx techdemo, primarily focused on showing off physx, going to put more time into their water effects, than HL2 that didn't have physx and therefore didn't spend all their time on the materials and water. You can't blindly say physx does it better, you can only say physx is entirely focusing on those effects while the other companies haven't and aren't. Its like saying an F1 McClaren car has a faster engine than a train, it doesn't mean the train maker couldn't make an uber fast engine, they simply aren't trying while McClarens entire focus is the speed of its car.
An artist can paint a better picture of a fruit bowl than I can, because he's a practiced painter and I never paint. THat doesn't mean I can't paint better if I tried, i've just never tried. Physx isn't better, its better in the area it focus's on, that doesn't make it the great, it makes it the only company even trying, if it wasn't seen as the best something would be wrong. But again, i've yet to see anything remotely close to the quality of its early material demo's in real games, because its not feasable to put 100% of the ppu power into one piece of cloth in a game as everything else would suck.
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A bit hard to follow what your saying here - but its no harder programming wise to implement the more complicated physics effects that need hardware acceleration than it is to implement most software physics solutions... infact physx makes it easier than most as the API does a huge amount of the leg work and you can easily setup a scene and interactions with just a few calls. Infact you don't even need much knowledge of physics to setup for interactions between rigid and animated primitive bodies.
There is no real difference when programming for physx between software and hardware features - you just chose if hardware acceleration is enabled or not.
Caporegime
- Joined
- 18 Oct 2002
- Posts
- 33,188
my point was, if you just use the software, for basic physic in any old game, basic interactions thats one thing, simple to add in, it doesn't mean you're doing anything difficult or spectacular just saves writing yourself a physics engine. But to use hardware features, well theres no point at all to using the hardware if you've got nothing to actually use it for, IE, extra workload thats not easily handled.
The problem is every extra has to be programed, the physics and the API might be there, but the designer/programmer has to actually decide on things to add in, has to design them, has to program them and if they are going to do fancy physics effects they still have to do a large amount of the programming. Having the Physx tool book doesn't change the fact they have to decide what will react to what and in what manner. you still have to give, say a box, a mass, decide what damage it needs to break, how it will break, 2 pieces, 4 pieces, 8 pieces, etc, design the box, design the box pieces and how it looks broken up, get it working, bug check the whole thing so no matter where it is in the level the pieces don't fall through the ground or turn pink, or turn into a penis shaped pieces.
The physx part is the tiniest smallest part of the process. Once every single item is given its design paramaters, its animations, its colours, its textures etc, etc, which is hours and hours of work for the tiniest piece, then the physx simply runs the calculations afterwards.
As I said, its completely night and day between hardware and software in terms of actual design and use, not the actual physics being used.
You can use the physx software api instead of writing your own, to make a game 2 seconds long where a guy drops from a tree located on the moon, to the surface. YOu can write your own easily enough but you can just use the physx software. Using the physx hardware, of course you could run that same thing but there would be no point, using the physx hardware is a entirely different matter to software and again, I see nothing from EA or 2k or any other "partner" that states they will use the physx hardware for increased numbers of effects, more realism or anything else. The annoucement itself means nothing more than EA 2k in there own games only(which are few, far between and not very good) could simply use the software and do nothing fancy with physx at all.
drunkenmaster said "Pottsey, I don't really want to get into it again but, the vid you linked to unsurprisingly says, TECHDEMO."
It's only a techdemo in that it's a scripted demo from the full game. Nvidia described it as a sneak peak first look at the game. The devs said "Cryostasis, the game that probably has more PhysX effects than any other project coming this Christmas or before it"
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cryostasis_videos.html skip to just past halfway though they talk about PhysX a lot and some of the stuff sounds very good if they pull it off decently.
As for "You can't blindly say physx does it better, you can only say physx is entirely focusing on those effects while the other companies haven't and aren't."
Many people have tried to do the PhysX effects in the Source engine that PhysX does and its always been much worse in Source. The cloth turned the fps down to sub 1fps, the liquids look really poor and killed FPS. Everything we have says the effects cannot be done decently on the CPU. Just look at all the YouTube videos of it failing on the CPU as its too slow to be useable.
Onto Mirror's edge you said "IE Mirror's edge, spent all the time on a few banners that ripple in the wind, and forgot, gameplay, story, playability, game length and basic collision detection that makes jumping a joke in many parts of the game, and jumping animation, in a game based entirely on jumping."
Load of rubbish, Mirror's edge didn't spend all the time on a few banners that ripple and forgot the story because of it. The game was just about complete and ready to ship when they suddenly decided to delay a month or two to add PhysX GPU effects into it. If the game has no game play or problems it's not because they spent too long on extra PhysX stuff. The point when PhysX was added, the game had already been though development and was ready to ship.
As for your comments on "The problem is every extra has to be programed, the physics and the API might be there..." there is so much wrong I don't even know where to start. Someone else can cover that one.
It's only a techdemo in that it's a scripted demo from the full game. Nvidia described it as a sneak peak first look at the game. The devs said "Cryostasis, the game that probably has more PhysX effects than any other project coming this Christmas or before it"
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_cryostasis_videos.html skip to just past halfway though they talk about PhysX a lot and some of the stuff sounds very good if they pull it off decently.
As for "You can't blindly say physx does it better, you can only say physx is entirely focusing on those effects while the other companies haven't and aren't."
Many people have tried to do the PhysX effects in the Source engine that PhysX does and its always been much worse in Source. The cloth turned the fps down to sub 1fps, the liquids look really poor and killed FPS. Everything we have says the effects cannot be done decently on the CPU. Just look at all the YouTube videos of it failing on the CPU as its too slow to be useable.
Onto Mirror's edge you said "IE Mirror's edge, spent all the time on a few banners that ripple in the wind, and forgot, gameplay, story, playability, game length and basic collision detection that makes jumping a joke in many parts of the game, and jumping animation, in a game based entirely on jumping."
Load of rubbish, Mirror's edge didn't spend all the time on a few banners that ripple and forgot the story because of it. The game was just about complete and ready to ship when they suddenly decided to delay a month or two to add PhysX GPU effects into it. If the game has no game play or problems it's not because they spent too long on extra PhysX stuff. The point when PhysX was added, the game had already been though development and was ready to ship.
As for your comments on "The problem is every extra has to be programed, the physics and the API might be there..." there is so much wrong I don't even know where to start. Someone else can cover that one.
Exactly, so even if they don't add extra "hardware only" bells and whistles you're still going to get better performance on NVidia cards where the standard Physx engine can be accelerated, why bog the CPU down with something it's never been good at?