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Batman: Arkham Origins : NVIDIA PhysX Gameplay Trailer

Phixsator said:
Most games sporting some sort of gimmicky or fancy physics are physX based but only because nVidia has been quick to offer the devs the kit not because there isnt anything as good out there. If we look at borderlands 2 we all see a mess of a physx title that is extremely picky about what setup it wants to run well or okayish on and which it dont with no regard to high end products (im talking strictly nvidia setup here not hybrids)



Actually if you look at latest Havok engine and what it can do using only the CPU and with a proper dev behind the coding it does make stuff like physx look like a joke due to the hugh difference in resource requirements between the two while being able to do the same. Now im not saying the AMD guy is right that there is no point but i would argue that at this point in time there is no need.
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Not sure what you mean by mess of a physx. I think the whole idea with Borderlands was that it was a bit chaotic. I found that Borderlands PhysX ran better on lower tier cards than it did higher end, at least in the first couple of builds.

I guess I'm a little closed minded being that I currently own Nvidia GPUs, but people making petty knocks at the effects in BAO seem a bit bitter. It's not fair, no. But at the end of the day they're a company. People forget that Nvidia did actually buy out Ageia. That's their money spent, nobody else.
 
MjFrosty said:
Not sure what you mean by mess of a physx.
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you forgot Title. It was a mess for a leading PhysX title.

MjFrosty said:
I guess I'm a little closed minded being that I currently own Nvidia GPUs, but people making petty knocks at the effects in BAO seem a bit bitter. It's not fair, no. But at the end of the day they're a company. People forget that Nvidia did actually buy out Ageia. That's their money spent, nobody else.
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I wouldnt call you close minded. You are not aggressively defending anything. Its okay to be bias as long as you dont run around and claim otherwise.

I dont mind that nVidia has PhysX. I understand that you need every edge to survive on as a company. But i do mind is the fact that nVidia has done little with it causing it to run very badly on their own hardware let alone CPUs and the later with the excuse that CPUs arnt powerful enough which is an outright lie. This is all regarding version 2.x.x so im curious to see if they have fixed these issues in version 3.x.x.

to make physx something that is worth talking about i would say the following needs to be done.

1) Reduce the resource footprint. Its to resource heavy compared to what it does and compared to the competition(etc havok).
2) Keep taps on devs and make sure the implementation is done right. the PhysX brand dont need another BL2 disaster.
3) Keep it proprietary but remove the AMD lockout as there is no technical reason for it to be there(allowing hybrids, but not necessary directly supporting it). Do not divide the playerbase when we are talking about a feature that can have a huge amount of gameplay influence if used correctly. Devs are not gonna touch a piece of tech if it means shutting out 30-40% of their potentiel playerbase and physX will never go where it needs to be to be amazing(real gameplay changing physics) if it isnt available to everyone(if agiea could do it why cant nVidia? as its basicly the same tech)
 
There were a few issues with performance in Borderlands 2 you're not wrong. But on the whole PhysX performance has come along a great deal. I do remember the days where it would greatly impact performance. In fact the original Batman AA was an example of this at times. Mirrors Edge is another example where a dedicated card was essential. It seemed to be more CPU intensive on earlier builds which had a massive knock-on effect.

We've come a way since then however, and games like Metro LL which is very resource intensive for example has little to no impact on performance with it enabled (on new drivers obviously). Making it propitiatory is cruel, there isn't really any excuse for it. But comments by AMD to say that the CPU is perfectly capable of doing calculations goes against pretty much everything that's been said by other leading experts to date. CPU's are ancient when compared to modern day GPUS, it makes no sense to offload physics onto it.

It is IMO a case of swings and round-abouts. And at this late stage, there is obviously the possibility that it could perform better on AMD cards if given the chance. I doubt they'd want that as backlash. Until there comes a time where owning an Nvidia GPU is more grief than it's worth, I'm not particularly fussed personally...;)
 
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MjFrosty said:
But comments by AMD to say that the CPU is perfectly capable of doing calculations goes against pretty much everything that's been said by other leading experts to date. CPU's are ancient when compared to modern day GPUS, it makes no sense to offload physics onto it.
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I would call Intel among the experts since they are developing Havok and they have demonstrated that for the time being the CPU is enough. Im sure that things will be different in the future and i wouldnt mind pure GPU accelerated physics if it meant gameplay changing effects instead of the gimmicks we get now. While i love blowing up buildings in BF3 its actually quiet limited and its annoying when you meet a simple concrete wall that appears to be indestructable. I think we need to have way better physics and advanced AI but what i am dreaming off is like 50 years away :( call it high expectations :P
 
Phixsator said:
I dont mind that nVidia has PhysX. I understand that you need every edge to survive on as a company. But i do mind is the fact that nVidia has done little with it causing it to run very badly on their own hardware let alone CPUs and the later with the excuse that CPUs arnt powerful enough which is an outright lie. This is all regarding version 2.x.x so im curious to see if they have fixed these issues in version 3.x.x.

to make physx something that is worth talking about i would say the following needs to be done.

1) Reduce the resource footprint. Its to resource heavy compared to what it does and compared to the competition(etc havok).
2) Keep taps on devs and make sure the implementation is done right. the PhysX brand dont need another BL2 disaster.
3) Keep it proprietary but remove the AMD lockout as there is no technical reason for it to be there(allowing hybrids, but not necessary directly supporting it). Do not divide the playerbase when we are talking about a feature that can have a huge amount of gameplay influence if used correctly. Devs are not gonna touch a piece of tech if it means shutting out 30-40% of their potentiel playerbase and physX will never go where it needs to be to be amazing(real gameplay changing physics) if it isnt available to everyone(if agiea could do it why cant nVidia? as its basicly the same tech)
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Bare in mind that compared to the competition PhysX has more footprint because you have the combination of Physics API and GPU compute libraries.

PhysX also differs from highly opptimised CPU based libraries in that its a more complete physics library that does come with a bit more bulk and performance implications but means it supports a wider variety of functionality in a more versatile/generalised format. (Though that doesn't excuse the relatively poor CPU performance with primitive AB, RB, etc. simulations although its actually pretty average compared to the competition it should be better).

The original PPU was designed around fixed function hardware when nVidia picked it up they ported the functions to run on the GPU on general purpose shaders the problem you have here is that nVidia are reluctant to rewrite the software to work on top of directcompute or openCL, etc. as this would reflect badly on their own product (CUDA) and other companies won't adopt CUDA as they see it as competition to their own offerings in that area. (This is why its not as cross platform accessable as the original Ageia offering).
 
Rroff said:
The original PPU was designed around fixed function hardware when nVidia picked it up they ported the functions to run on the GPU on general purpose shaders the problem you have here is that nVidia are reluctant to rewrite the software to work on top of directcompute or openCL, etc. as this would reflect badly on their own product (CUDA) and other companies won't adopt CUDA as they see it as competition to their own offerings in that area. (This is why its not as cross platform accessable as the original Ageia offering).
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IMHO they dont have to rewrite it or port it away from CUDA. Im fine with them keeping it on their GPU platform. What im not fine about is the intentional driver lockout the second it detects an AMD GPU as the main render because there is no reason for this except that nVidia think its hurting them in some way which i find to be extremely close minded.

If they opened up they would suddenly have 2 markets instead of just the one. 1 for those who want their GPUs as the main render and 1 for those who want a dedicated PPU/Physx card. And the beautiful thing is they dont even have to support hybrids but it would still mean more people/devs would adopt PhysX as it is suddenly not locked from 40% of the playerbase and everyone today would at some point be able purchase a single slot gt 640 or whatever the equalant model would be.

Im really tearing my hair out sometimes cause i think the concept of physx is cool and while ive seen all these cool tech demos from other engines no one seems to be using them to the fullest. I think its because of my passion for destruction :P i want to wrech havoc and see it on my screen.
 
Phixsator said:
IMHO they dont have to rewrite it or port it away from CUDA. Im fine with them keeping it on their GPU platform. What im not fine about is the intentional driver lockout the second it detects an AMD GPU as the main render because there is no reason for this except that nVidia think its hurting them in some way which i find to be extremely close minded.

If they opened up they would suddenly have 2 markets instead of just the one. 1 for those who want their GPUs as the main render and 1 for those who want a dedicated PPU/Physx card. And the beautiful thing is they dont even have to support hybrids but it would still mean more people/devs would adopt PhysX as it is suddenly not locked from 40% of the playerbase and everyone today would at some point be able purchase a single slot gt 640 or whatever the equalant model would be.

Im really tearing my hair out sometimes cause i think the concept of physx is cool and while ive seen all these cool tech demos from other engines no one seems to be using them to the fullest. I think its because of my passion for destruction :P i want to wrech havoc and see it on my screen.
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Yeah definetly agree there - always thought the decision to lock it out like that is odd at the very least they would sell more low end cards and if they are really that bothered about Q&A as they claim they could just leave it on beta drivers.
 
I'd love to see Havok engine produce real time smoke effects...


So simple yet so awesome... :D

giphy.gif
 
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pgi947 said:
I'm all for things like physx if it's actually put to good use, but effects like these just give the impression it's pointless, plenty of games have steam and floating bits of paper that aren't tied to a single brand of card.

More lazy developers then anything else.
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I think it's more of the case that steam and water effects etc move correctly not static (actually surrounding you as you walk through) while using less overhead than it would.
 
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