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AMD and NVIDIA butt heads over physics
- Thread starter Final8y
- Start date
Point? so is physx if you only use the precompiled binary API rather than SDK version.
Bullet is still a long way behind PhysX development wise especially for game useage - its great if you want hollywood style physics effects, not so great if your interacting with it in a realtime gaming environment... which is likely to largely outweight the other benefits unless a lot of attention is paid to this aspect.
One thing Bullet does have going for it is the completely rewritten professionally coded SIMD vector maths routines which give it a massive boost on CPU unfortunatly all that performance counts for nothing if your physics get in the way of gameplay.
End of the day any move to get high performance, detailed physics working in games is a step forward.
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lol
GTA4 used Bullet physics, plenty interactive that was, more than a few flappy flags and puffs of smoke anyways.......
Bullet is the third most used API behind Havoc and Physx...
I love how you imagine the API being used for Hollywood special effects somehow detracts from the thing...
What interactive effects does GPU Physx provide? None is the answer. Its all decorative effects.
Just like a politician and that doesn't sit well with the PC gaming community.
Physx will eventually die unless NV are paying devs to implement it. They have no other reason to use it in their games as there is no point in making their game less attractive to half of the market. It's also still to be used to any great effect in any decent games.
Man of Honour
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Agreed. I've no idea what warranted a 'lol' response to your post.
From what you said it does sound like Bullet has the potential to be very nice in future (if only for the better CPU performance and card-agnostic approach).
Associate
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Speaking as someone who has a GTS250 just for physx, I would MUCH rather there was a fully open physics solution that could run on anyones card. Why? cause then it will be in MORE games and games will use it for more than just effects because it can run on anyones card. Nvidia are a bit of a pain when it comes to things like this, locking people in sure works from a busniess point of view, but not from a consumer point of view 
Speaking as someone who has a GTS250 just for physx, I would MUCH rather there was a fully open physics solution that could run on anyones card. Why? cause then it will be in MORE games and games will use it for more than just effects because it can run on anyones card. Nvidia are a bit of a pain when it comes to things like this, locking people in sure works from a busniess point of view, but not from a consumer point of view
Like cellfator which does still impress me which there has been nothing close to it since because of now its limited to one make of GPU doing the render.
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PhysX being good or not isn't what is good for the Gaming industry as a whole. It is only good for Nvidia as a business. It allows them to promote themselves to sell more cards. They don't have "evolution" in mind in terms of progression for the gaming industry, in my opinion personally.
We need an open platform. I think NV really should just let their cards do the talking instead of their PR/Advertisement machine. But business is business.
We need an open platform. I think NV really should just let their cards do the talking instead of their PR/Advertisement machine. But business is business.
Soldato
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- 29 May 2005
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Open is better, PhysX is not as open as some people want you to believe. PhysX will die a death like its brothers Beta max, Laser disks, Neo Geo into the technology oblivion
Look how much slating GTA4 got though for being "unoptimised" though, the console versions barely scraped 20fps and you needed a mammoth quad core PC to get that version to run any better.
The physics implementation is most likely what bogged the engine down so much.
Man of Honour
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How convenient.
Quite a few games use physics libraries like bullet, ODE, havok, etc. to provide more than just flappy flags.
The small details of the simulation can make quite a difference to gameplay, what looks great for making a movie could result in a player hanging up on objects, getting weird input interuptions, etc. that make the game a chore to play.
The PhysX API is a fully functional API that provides all the normal RB, articulated bodies, rag dolls, forcefields, etc. etc. and also includes soft body, fluid dynamics and destruction physics beyond what most CPU based API provide as even with the best multi-threading code they aren't capable of doing those simulations with feasible realtime performance, whereas on even a fairly mainstream GPU its perfectly possible. Developers have only used the decorative effects so far because they can be disabled without impact on the gameplay - they don't want to cut out a large slice of their audience by locking it to physx.
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I'm not an advocate for PhysX, I am something of an advocate for hardware physics.
I dislike mis-informed PhysX hating - I'm not a fan of what nVidia have done with it - but I dislike people slagging it off, not really understanding what they are talking about, because its the popular thing to do.
I was mealy saying that Rroff in that particular post was beefing up PhysX like Potts, what's wrong in that? It's an observation. No digs were taken, no insults posted, I fail to see what that you've linked to the "moderating" post...???