2K Games, EA hop on the PhysX bandwagon

queamin · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:34

Final8y said:
20% is not a significant portion.

In most games "physics" is little more than a couple of simplified movement types (linear and mavity), rotating the objects heading (vector) and doing simple collision detection without orientating the object to the collision. & people love it & don't care how it was done

Some company's are moaning now about not selling enough games think if they cut that down to 20%

Rroff · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:36

20% was a rough estimate on the amount of programming involving "physics" in your average computer game.

queamin · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:39

Rroff said:
if you wanna talk about beta testing (and this isn't where I would draw my "credentials" from) - I've been involved in private (not public) testing of around 1 in 5 of the titles released over the last 5-6 years or so including city of heros, enemy territory quake wars, hellgate london and a good many others. I've also done contracted level design for a number of smaller titles and been involved in the programming side of more than one title.

Game company's are cutting back and some are going to the wall you think they will alienate a very large portion of their paying customers,at the moment havok can be done on intel and amd cpu's.
What about consoles?

Rroff · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:42

physx can be done on intel and amd cpus and a range of other hardware - sony bought into it for the PS3 and the sdk is available for the 360 (tho performance being completely CPU bound on that platform its probably not great).

That was one of my original points about alienating customers and why I dislike companies for dragging their feet over this as its stagnating game development progress for the time being.

queamin · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:43

Rroff said:
20% was a rough estimate on the amount of programming involving "physics" in your average computer game.

What is the share at moment 50/50 still a large amount to shut out,i know a lot of people on the forums would change to nvidia if hw physx really took off, but i can see the 8800 era happening again if it did.

queamin · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:50

Rroff said:
physx can be done on intel and amd cpus and a range of other hardware - sony bought into it for the PS3 and the sdk is available for the 360 (tho performance being completely CPU bound on that platform its probably not great).

That was one of my original points about alienating customers and why I dislike companies for dragging their feet over this as its stagnating game development progress for the time being.

Nvidia do it as well, all company's do it,look at what happened with dx10/10.1,
a company will try and kill something/slow it down if it works better on another company product.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:51

Current market penetration is around 60% nvidia 30% ATI, 10% other...

G92 is currently the most common video card chipset in gaming machines, closely followed by 7600 based cards (which wouldn't do physx :|) and then the 4800 series.

The actual rough number of the market with physx capable GPUs is approx 26% (including cards like the 8600 which wouldn't really handle rendering + physics).

If you compare 200 series cards against 4800, the 200 only account for ~1.2% compared to ~3.1% for 4800.

queamin · 22 Dec 2008 at 22:52

I want hw physx but it worries me that nvidia is pushing it because if they push ati/amd out with a low share of the market then things will get pricey and stagnate.

Rroff · 22 Dec 2008 at 23:00

That is a possibility

ShaolinDreams · 22 Dec 2008 at 23:01

i like their products but i hate their policies/agenda

Perfect_Chaos · 22 Dec 2008 at 23:27

Only one problem i can see and that is people that use crossfire or sli since mobos have 2 slots, so the only way around it is buy a GX2/X2 card to go in 1 slot and keep whatever in the other for physics.

Maybe they will develop a graphics card that is useful for physics & fps, one with hyperthreading

Rroff · 23 Dec 2008 at 00:01

a couple of 200 series cards in SLI can handle physx and rendering fine with little slowdown to the rendering performance.

Vince · 23 Dec 2008 at 11:30

It's great that companies like Nvidia are pushing forward with their Physx technology; I do feel however that we are missing something. Nvidia only really started pushing Physx after Intel acquired Havok (Widely accepted to be the most commonly used physics engine among developers, producing some groundbreaking titles such as hl2, Bioshock, Fallout 3 etc)

Can you see the machine that is Intel sitting back and letting Havok die out?... People see this as an ATI vs Nvidia thing, personally I see this more as an Nvidia vs Intel thing and ATI are sitting on the wall. With the rumours about labradee(sp?), which will no doubt be highly optimised for Havok, I think we are simply seeing Nvidia trying to protect their market position with marketing for Physx.

Great technologies but this is very early, unfortunately with Nvidia fighting battles on both fronts with both AMD(ATI) & Intel producing both CPU's and GPU's, with a fairly well aligned strategy (Fusion?), I fear that Physx could well die out before it has really matured, I hope this is not the case but just my ten cents.

w3bbo · 23 Dec 2008 at 13:15

Larrabee

mmj_uk · 23 Dec 2008 at 13:42

VinceB1 said:
People see this as an ATI vs Nvidia thing, personally I see this more as an Nvidia vs Intel thing and ATI are sitting on the wall.

It's a CPU vs GPU thing, there is no ATI anymore it's AMD and they are a CPU maker.

What we're seeing is CPU makers under threat from GPU's. Both Intel and AMD understandably want to keep physics on the CPU regardless of how much better todays GPU's are at it by comparison.

Keeping physics on the CPU will give AMD/Intel something to work towards in the future (actually getting CPU's to run physics decently), if physics is done on the GPU where do the CPU makers go from there? sure they'll still release newer CPU's but upgrading them won't have as much impact on performance.

There was even rumours a while back of NVidia making a x86 CPU but not having the license, it's more likely they were using the GPU to accelerate x86 performance.

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/11/can-nvidia-kill-the-x86-architecture/

CPU's are are under threat so neither AMD or Intel will embrace Physx with open arms regardless of how much better it is compared to anything they can offer in the forseeable future.

layte · 23 Dec 2008 at 13:45

I find your belief as to the importance of physics and the baring it will have on future CPU use laughable.

That is all, back to insulting each other now.

Voodoo1 launches- Wow we wont need such rapid CPU speed increases now
GeForce 1 - Now the GPU will do all the work, who needs a fast CPU?
PhysX on the GPU - lolCPU its all on the GPU now!!! lolintel lolamd

Vince · 23 Dec 2008 at 14:01

w3bbo said:
Larrabee

Cheers w3bbo.

mmj_uk · 23 Dec 2008 at 14:02

layte said:
I find your belief as to the importance of physics and the baring it will have on future CPU use laughable.

That is all, back to insulting each other now.

Physics is one of many things that the GPU is far superior at, do you think it will end with Physx?

I'll leave you with some quotes from the article:

In order to survive, Nvidia needs to find an end market that values graphics processors for something beyond graphics. Or push graphics processors into compute-intensive applications in hopes of relegating x86 chips to running the OS and nothing else.

Today Nvidia’s CEO fired the first shot by introducing what it calls “The World’s Most Affordable Vista Premium PC,” a low-cost platform containing a Nvidia graphics processor and a lower-end CPU from Via Technologies. Nvidia isn’t only snubbing Intel, it’s trying to prove that PC buyers are better off with functional CPUs, and that high-performance tasks can be trusted to a graphics processor.

There's a whole host of other things that can be offloaded to the GPU for superior performance, CPU's are in danger of becoming largely redundant.

queamin · 23 Dec 2008 at 14:06

I think it depends how interested intel are about pushing Larrabee and if they just want it main stream or pushing to go up nvidia/amd top cards.
I thought it would be main stream for now.

Vince · 23 Dec 2008 at 14:07

mmj_uk said:
It's a CPU vs GPU thing, there is no ATI anymore it's AMD and they are a CPU maker.

What we're seeing is CPU makers under threat from GPU's. Both Intel and AMD understandably want to keep physics on the CPU regardless of how much better todays GPU's are at it by comparison.

Keeping physics on the CPU will give AMD/Intel something to work towards in the future (actually getting CPU's to run physics decently), if physics is done on the GPU where do the CPU makers go from there? sure they'll still release newer CPU's but upgrading them won't have as much impact on performance.

There was even rumours a while back of NVidia making a x86 CPU but not having the license, it's more likely they were using the GPU to accelerate x86 performance.

http://gigaom.com/2008/04/11/can-nvidia-kill-the-x86-architecture/

CPU's are are under threat so neither AMD or Intel will embrace Physx with open arms regardless of how much better it is compared to anything they can offer in the forseeable future.

I'm not convinced I feel it is the other way around; bringing the gpu onto the processor (for the mainstream) is where I would lay my money.

I could be so far off its untrue; the test of time will enlighten us no doubt.