What was your first impressions of PhysX (Mafia II)

[AMG]

They should make a racing game with Physx from the ground up and make the crashes and body deformation the best ever, too show use what it really could do and also the actual simulation of driving.

why? Shift and dirt do just fine with thier own phyics system if they do that, it will lock out some market, as thats what makes a driving game.

also most companies that make the simulation games on a true scale are not that big like simbin

yeah consle gamers wouldn't notice the sturtring

 

[Damien.]

Ive been playing the demo with Crossfire 5870's.

I don't fell left out at all, knowing that I cant use Physx.

The game still looks great and is more than enjoyable.

 

[MOOGLEYS]

Physics is a marketing gimmick to sell Nvidia hardware. Developers are paid by Nvidia to only enable certain effects to make their cards appear better.
There is no reason why Physics effects cannot be done on the Cpu, especially on a multi core cpu.

 

[FlukeRogi]

Mafia 2 looks awful compared to the horsepower it needs.

I'm replaying Batman AA at the moment, it looks far better than mafia 2 and runs like the brown stuff of a stick with full physx

Batman isn't rendering a populated cityscape though, is it..

 

[RavenXXX2]

Come on M2 is a DX9 game and going by the demo it just looks like an xbox 360 game with low rez textures and all, there is nothing demanding about it all, GTA4 has better textures and detail.

Physics is a marketing gimmick to sell Nvidia hardware. Developers are paid by Nvidia to only enable certain effects to make their cards appear better.
There is no reason why Physics effects cannot be done on the Cpu, especially on a multi core cpu.

+1 especially the constructed effects in M2

 

[straxusii]

Batman isn't rendering a populated cityscape though, is it..

Yeah but it blows mafia 2 away even when it isnt rendering a populated cityscape!

 

[Damien.]

Yeah but it blows mafia 2 away even when it isnt rendering a populated cityscape!

Wow, you've played the full game of Mafia 2 already !?

Incredible.

 

[jigger]

I noticed a lot of people said it was make or break for PhysX on Mafia II as it was currently dead technology..

What was your impressions?

It all seems very unrealistic, which is kind of the opposite of what the system is meant to be showing.

The cloths don't move in a natural way and smoke effects just look weird. The crash impacts from the cars don't deform the cars with much accuracy and the bonnets just flip open like they weigh nothing. I think its all a bit distracting, some things look so strange that they detract a lot from the game in some ways.

 

[coupe69]

snip.

"Jigger in shock anti anything Nvidia post"

I think the PhysX in the demo are quite effective, and would much rather have them included than not.

To say they distract from the game is just BS, but it's no more than I've come to expect from you tbh.

 

[RavenXXX2]

Coupe what you been smoking..the effects looks so bolted on it's sad, physx was better in BAA.You telling me you need a dedicated GTX 285 to run some fake physics lol...SCAM.

Oh yeah they do distract from the game when they knock 100fps of your performance

 

[Mr Krugga]

PhysX in Mafia 2? Well... it's there, you can see it. There's more particles that add to the feeling of action scenes, although on high it seems unrealistic to say the least. I haven't noticed clothes effects at first till someone pointed them out in the benchmark thread. I must be blind though. Surely these effects could be implemented with Havoc and much less performance impact, they're pretty simple, not intense or vivid in any way and are a waste of power IMO. Might try the final game with PhysX card to see if anything changed from the demo but I highly doubt it. PhysX is there to advertise Nvidia, nothing more than that. Hard to defend the technology that won't be ever implemented to its fullest because of the hardware limitation.

 

[coupe69]

Coupe what you been smoking..the effects looks so bolted on it's sad, physx was better in BAA.You telling me you need a dedicated GTX 285 to run some fake physics lol...SCAM.

Oh yeah they do distract from the game when they knock 100fps of your performance

Well that's your opinion, and we're all entitled to our own opinions. I for one will be playing the full release with PhysX on high and enjoy the game which generally runs over 60fps anyway

 

[jigger]

"Jigger in shock anti anything Nvidia post"

I think the PhysX in the demo are quite effective, and would much rather have them included than not.

To say they distract from the game is just BS, but it's no more than I've come to expect from you tbh.

So you dont care how bad FizzX is you would have it anyway. Yet I am unable to look at FiZZx from an objective point of view.

 

[coupe69]

So you dont care how bad FizzX is you would have it anyway.

I'm not the one saying it's bad

 

[straxusii]

One thing I find utterly amazing with physx is the power needed to run it, it's just ridiculous!

 

[RavenXXX2]

We got the power, the game just does not use it, 20-50% GPU usage for the most part with high phsyx.

 

[MOOGLEYS]

Its a con.. Nvidia always state that physics needs a seperate "NVIDIA" PPU to work which is crap. Physics can run on any system with a decent multi-core cpu. Unfortunately for Nvidia they do not make CPU,s unlike AMD/ATI so they need to sell a seperate PPU or Card enabled with Cuda and restrict developers from using CPU computations as this will make the technology available to all and Nvidia will loose sales.......

Its a con and it will fail. Nvidia are basicly trying to halt progress by selling a pointless idea, that can and will be implemented by cpu..

This kind of says it all really....

Back in 2009 Nvidia also disabled support of PhysX on the company's own GeForce GPUs as well as Ageia PhysX physics processing cards when drivers detected ATI Radeon hardware present.

Why do this other than to force a consumer into buying only Nvidia Hardware..

 

[Geckovich]

I was under the impression that regardless of GPU used the demo was borked and running physX on the CPU? Then again maybe I'm just several days behind the curve here

Either way my CPU copes OK with running medium physX settings in the demo. There's a little bit of slowdown towards the end up the mission but not too bad.

 

[Nico_Joey]

demo was borked and running physX on the CPU?

I think the latest Nvidia drives tried to fix that but no idea if its still abit borked, ati cards seem to be running it fine afaik though which is nice

 

[oweneades]

I was under the impression that regardless of GPU used the demo was borked and running physX on the CPU? Then again maybe I'm just several days behind the curve here

This was the case when the demo was first launched.

It has since been updated (the actual download itself) to include the latest physx driver.

It *should* now work but there are work-a-rounds if it doesn't.