EVGA Bans Discussion of PhysX Mod

[Rroff]

Yah pretty stupid... if someone did make a compelling physx title or 2 that people could pop in a £30-40 nvidia GPU for physics they could shift a lot of those G92 and 40nm GT200 series cards that otherwise don't tend to fly off the shelves and it would drive more physx development.

 

[Dave****]

This is just another reason to add to why I am getting a 2gb 5870 Vapor-X. Was hoping I could put my 260 in as well for Physx... will just sell it and put that towards another 5870

 

[Greebo]

This is just another reason to add to why I am getting a 2gb 5870 Vapor-X. Was hoping I could put my 260 in as well for Physx... will just sell it and put that towards another 5870

It's not that hard to apply the physx mod. Install nvidia drivers plus a couple of reboots and job is done.

I have done it with both my old gtx260 but I sold that as worth too much back then as a physx card and now have a £35 9800GTX+ running at 800/2000 which is more than capable.

 

[bledd]

What else are EVGA supposed to do? I don't support what nVidia have done with locking out PhysX - but EVGA are a legal entity and have to protect themselves as such - the author is an idiot. Similiar as OcUK can't allow warez, etc. to be discussed on their forums.

Exactly..

Having a go on the nvidia forums makes sense, but not on the EVGA forums

Nvidia should have kept physx as a standalone card, and just added their name to it. Bundling it with their cards only has really hampered the development of it, it's lose/lose for gamers and nvidia, because Ati owners don't have access to physx at all now

PC gaming should not be split the same way consoles are, having two distinct camps is a bad thing imo.

 

[kkbigal]

These are GAMES, not ultra releastic high accuracy critical systems.

This is exactly what I was thinking when I wrote my first post - as well as not requiring that level of detail, developers have to take into consideration the effect physics will actually have on the gameplay, because it could result in a much less enjoyable game.

Anyone remember the original Red Faction with the Geomod engine that you could supposedly blow everything to pieces? The technology worked (they included a sandbox room), but the game hardly made use of it; I imagine the developers realised that there was little point designing levels when the player could just blow holes in the wall or dig a tunnel to the level exit with grenades.

As for keeping Physx a standalone add-in card product, it would never have worked unless they could have sold the cards for £30 tops (I forget how much they sold for); not enough benefit to justify the investment. By packaging it in nVidia GPUs, they suddenly increase the installed user base who can use Physx far beyond what they'd ever do selling standalone cards and I'm sure they were hoping this would be a big score for them. The problem is, there is no killer app or real industry support pushing the need for Physx over software alternatives, so it's going to remain a small nicety on nVidia cards, but not develop much beyond that.

 

[naruto0822]

It is a shame, the way they force developers to implement features for their cards only and render Nvidia cards useless for physx when an ATI GPU is in the system. ATI have publicly said that they are open with their developer relations program, they will never exclude Nvidia owners from any features they help to implement in to games, everyone will benefit.

Yeah I agree to you.

 

[wolvers]

Yah pretty stupid... if someone did make a compelling physx title or 2 that people could pop in a £30-40 nvidia GPU for physics they could shift a lot of those G92 and 40nm GT200 series cards that otherwise don't tend to fly off the shelves and it would drive more physx development.

Spot on. Until NV embrace it running on all systems, it will never develop into what it's capable of. Shame really.

It's not that hard to apply the physx mod. Install nvidia drivers plus a couple of reboots and job is done.

Have you found many bugs or instances where it simply won't work?

I saw your Batman bench results. It seemed to suggest that having a separate card for physx was always better/faster than running it on the same card used for graphics rendering.

 

[Greebo]

Have you found many bugs or instances where it simply won't work?

I saw your Batman bench results. It seemed to suggest that having a separate card for physx was always better/faster than running it on the same card used for graphics rendering.

It's not without the odd issue, I must admit. For instance with Mirror's Edge there are a couple of physx files in the game install directory you need to delete to get physx working using your Nvidia card and until the new fix came out the physx driver was not up to date enough for Metro 2033 to work.

And it doesn't help that Nvidia's driver team seem to spend time writing in anti mavity and slowdown timebombs into the newest physx drivers. The current ones are fine as the patch removes these timebombs.

However, I am sure there will be other issues in future games which then need a newer physx driver and it then won't work until the patch author gets an updated patch out but I can live with that. The author's forum usually has work arounds if any issues crop up.

I was very impressed with the Batman performance and just goes to shows that you do need a seperate physx card for it to work at full performance which Nvidia seem to suggest nowadays as well. Makes it even more bitter than you can't legitmately use a Nvidia card with another make.

 

[SirCanealot]

If CPUs are so powerful then why does using PhysX in CPU mode lag games like Mirror's Edge to a 5 fps crawl when breaking a window?

Or is it that PhysX is just horribly unoptimized for CPU usage?

Because it doesn't even bother to try and max out the CPU is one of the main reasons... :/