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Does this mean AMD can officially support hardware physx?

Soldato
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https://news.developer.nvidia.com/announcing-physx-sdk-4-0-an-open-source-physics-engine/


if so i hope it is not too little too late, i like physx
edit perhaps i was reading too much into opensource... there is a small print on there for the driver needed for gpu acceleration :(

I like the quote

PhysX has been the market leader in physics simulations for more than a decade.

Last time I checked were less than 20 AAA games supporting since 2006, (4 are the Batman ones) and of those only 2 I owned. (there are another 60 or so sub par games)
 
Soldato
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you are right physx was laughably under supported and i believe this is largely because AMD cards were locked out. When it was supported it was magnificent imo. (when done well) like you said, the batman games used it and it was a far better enhancement to the game than any resolution or other graphic detail setting.
 
Associate
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Last time I checked were less than 20 AAA games supporting since 2006, (4 are the Batman ones) and of those only 2 I owned. (there are another 60 or so sub par games)

PhysX is the most used Physics middleware used out there, but not as GPU physics. It's very common as cpu physics engine.

As for the main thread question, can AMD support it? On old games no, as no one will take the effort to patch old games. And for the future? I don't think it will change anything. APEX is still not open source and is much faster in gpu physx than "PhysX". It supports AMD through DX12, but no one is using it, as no one wants to use a closed library, which might run bad on AMD.

It's mostly a step by nvidia to stop developtment of PhysX and let the open source community do the rest, while shifting software engineers to more important projects.
 
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Man of Honour
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Yeah as above PhysX is actually used in a lot of games just not the full GPU accelerated version - for instance Deus Ex: Mankind Divided uses it extensively as well as Apex/FleX stuff. Also it isn't just gaming - PhysX is used for modelling physics in a lot of areas outside of gaming.
 
Soldato
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The software version runs on anything. Though I think Havok is probably better anyway.

It's the hardware one which isn't. But practically no one used it and it was pretty buggy a lot of the time. Planetside 2 actually patched it out quite early on because it kept causing crashes abd barely anyone enabled it.

Nvidia never seems to learn with these closed APIs, 3D vision went the same way. G-sync will to eventually. People always prefer open source because it's cheap/free.
 
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Man of Honour
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But practically no one used it and it was pretty buggy a lot of the time. Planetside 2 actually patched it out because it kept causing crashes.

Not sure that was the API itself - more likely developers not having a robust implementation of it - I played 1-2 games back in the day that had hardware PhysX options that could have pretty insane amount of objects being simulated without a single crash - City of Heroes with the advanced options for instance every bullet based weapon with the full PhysX option would eject brass on firing which would permanently stay in the world rolling around - you could literally carpet rooms with them and go back through the map and they'd still be there without a single problem other than obviously the framerate hit was pretty big.
 
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I look forward to all the armchair experts who told us time and time again how Nvidia purposely gimped the CPU calculation paths going through the code and proving themselves right after all this time.
 
Soldato
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Does this mean AMD can officially support hardware physx?
Nope, this is an updated version of the software development kit for PhysX with improved features and open source. It basically means that developers using PhysX can now tweak/customize it.

Does anything still use it?
Upcoming Borderlands and Metro games will. Generally it's only used on big budget titles as only Nvidia cards get the full benefit from it (CPU PhysX doesn't look as good) and most users won't have systems to run ultra everything anyway.
 
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Nah, since you already knocked it out the park with the feculent nonsense, since I couldn't hold a stick to ***** like that, only the real pros can, so the floors all yours.
Apologies, that was a very childish post and I should know better.

In all seriousness though. The PhysX code has been available for a while now and at no point has anyone been able to show Nividia purposely hampering the performance of the CPU calculation path. It would help if people who constantly are the first and loudest to shout about how company X are doing underhanded things take a moment to look back on this and think, you know what, perhaps I shouldn't make wild claims that I have absolutely no evidence for.
 
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Nvidia never seems to learn with these closed APIs, 3D vision went the same way. G-sync will to eventually. People always prefer open source because it's cheap/free.

People prefer open source because you're rarely locked into any one vendor.
 
Soldato
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I remember quite some time ago when I bought my dedicated PhysX card.

Im still to this day wondering why I ever bothered to get it, because I never really saw any benefit in any actual games, only in the PhysX Demos.

Even today, I cannot actually think of any game I have, or that I care about, that plays any better with hardware PhysX over software? - Im up for anyone who will give any suggestions.
 
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