http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJv_WTddM9w a "few" more debris... sadly a lot of people just won't notice the difference between that and debris that don't interact with the environment - for me its like night and day.
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is Physx a big factor?
- Thread starter nlr
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Waste of time until it actually adds something to the gameplay other than visual effects. Look at HL2 and Battlefield Bad Company 2 - both games with strong, ground breaking physics engines that both used physics in a new and engaging way... neither needed proprietary, manufacturer limited drivers or software. That says it all IMO.
Up until reading this thread I would have never thought about physx when purchasing a new video card. However, I must admit some of those effects looked really quite good. Only recently I have played games where you get leaves and suchlike that disappear once near the ground, where as physx takes things like that into consideration. So, if my 4870x2 were to meet its maker today, yes, albeit by a fraction, yes...it would make a difference to me. The fact that I would have bought a nvidia 480 anyway is besides the point.
Agree entirely. All PhysX is to date is a tiny miniscule eye-candy add-ons.
PhysX...
Well, I used it in the past and never enjoyed it tbh. I owned a GeForce 9600GSO (a great card for PhysX with its 96 shaders btw) and the only thing I noticed was my primary GPU running hotter. Nah, just kidding but that's part of the story.
The video above shows all the differences you may really encounter whilst using PhysX. Do you really find those "eye candies" attractive? Most of them, if not all, can be recreated using any other engines such as Havoc plus they're not appealing enough to be considered worthwhile IMO? Sure, Batman doesn't look as good without the smoke effects but would you really noticed if these were added without PhysX effects? There's nothing more to add and though I agree with Rroff that the technology has its potential, I highly doubt it will ever, I mean it, ever be used in any particularly interesting way. Yes, PhysX in Mafia 2 looks appealing but then again - it's highly unlikely that this console game will use the technology to the level where playing without it will suffer from the lack of it. Nvidia has the moneyz and they will use it so game developers will benefit from "technological advantages" that green team sports but the end result is clearly not engaging.
Well, I used it in the past and never enjoyed it tbh. I owned a GeForce 9600GSO (a great card for PhysX with its 96 shaders btw) and the only thing I noticed was my primary GPU running hotter. Nah, just kidding but that's part of the story.
The video above shows all the differences you may really encounter whilst using PhysX. Do you really find those "eye candies" attractive? Most of them, if not all, can be recreated using any other engines such as Havoc plus they're not appealing enough to be considered worthwhile IMO? Sure, Batman doesn't look as good without the smoke effects but would you really noticed if these were added without PhysX effects? There's nothing more to add and though I agree with Rroff that the technology has its potential, I highly doubt it will ever, I mean it, ever be used in any particularly interesting way. Yes, PhysX in Mafia 2 looks appealing but then again - it's highly unlikely that this console game will use the technology to the level where playing without it will suffer from the lack of it. Nvidia has the moneyz and they will use it so game developers will benefit from "technological advantages" that green team sports but the end result is clearly not engaging.
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Dont forget ATI can use Havok on GPU...
I actually swapped in an 8800 GTX just to see the allegedly amazing physix effects in Batman AA and I didn't notice anything at all. No not even during the scarecrow levels. It's a marketing gimmick but it does work because it made me feel like I was missing out on something on the playthrough with the ATI card.
Did you patch it up to 1.1? And enable it from the launcher exe?
Won't see any physx otherwise.
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Night and day, yup, performance maybe, the effects themselves are crap. So a bullet hits the "glass wall", and each time the glass debrie effect happens, its basically an explosion, where glass goes off in a spherical explosion with glass going in each direction, including opposite the direction of the bullet.
This is the problem with physx, its wasted on effects that simply aren't realistic. Same with the wood, its not calculated, its not realistic and its really not interacting with the enviroment, if it was it would be interacting with the bullet and the glass would all be shattering on the side opposite the bullets impact(in general) also the glass is mostly shattering into identically sized little pieces and doesn't seem to actually be taking into account the structure or size of the original piece. IE the bullet hits, the glass shatters, the original piece of glass is gone and the debrie "appears" at the site of the bullet and goes in a premade "explosion" type effect where it spreads out evenly in all directions.
Honestly, thats not even anywhere near close to realistic. Its different, because they put effort into making it different, its not the slightest bit more realistic, and considering its a very very poor effect, and really shouldn't be taking more cpu time, so it feels like more Nvidia pointless inclusion to damage performance and cheat the user out of a better experience rubbish.
Lets be honest, those bits aren't any more interactive, and the "performance cost" of truly accurate physics, is keeping track of many individually sized pieces, and calculating each piece of debries movement individually. The debrie is pre rendered, not moving realistically and therefore can't possible be being heavily calculated each time, especially as each glass shattering effect is all but identical to the last, despite bullets not hitting each piece in the same place or same angle, IE theres no way they should be so similar each time.
Just watched a bit more, its really really awful. THe glass effects don't even centre around the bullets explosion and infact seem to be very slightly "delayed", half the "glass explosion" type effects seem to be in the slightly long location, delayed, and again, the glass will explode evenly in all directions.
THe actual glass panes in the next scene are also "exploding", one bullet hits and a huge area of glass shatters into identical pieces each time, with some going up, and some going forward, and some huge fragments going up, which simply wouldn't be possible.
There isn't a sane person that would defend that as night and day difference, when its actually worse in many bits, and completely unrealistic.
Its different, not more realistic and shouldn't cost ANY more performance, if it does, Nvidia is once again absolutely cheating both Nvidia and AMD users. IE add in a new physics api, make the effects different, but exactly no better, call it realistic, its not, kill performance so it only runs well when hardware accelerated.
Its an abomination on the gaming industry to be honest. Its more realistic debrie than Mafia 1, because its the best part of, what a decade newer, nothing to do with physx, and another attempt for Nvidia to buy off a dev to try to prove how good their physx is. If it was remotely realistic, they'd have a point, unfortunately, the glass wall spherical blowout effect is like something from 5-10 years ago itself. The glass pieces of debrie don't even look like pieces of glass it looks so bad.
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Mafia 2 demo is out on the 10th so I'll give my verdict on its physx performance and implementation then. I agree 100% with Drunken, physx is being held back by Nvidia and will ultimately never amount to anything more than some placebo effects .
Those PhysX effects in Mafia II are actually pretty bad. As has been mentioned, they look highly fake and are actually quite inaccurtate.
PhysX will never be worthwhile while nVidia are in control of it. That's why the best thing would be for it to die and be replaced by an open third party API that has no affiliation with either nVidia or ATi.
PhysX will never be worthwhile while nVidia are in control of it. That's why the best thing would be for it to die and be replaced by an open third party API that has no affiliation with either nVidia or ATi.
Thats designer error rather than a valid argument against the API itself...
rather than inline with the damage... bad design error