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does PhysX work on ATI..(proof?)

adamknox

adamknox

adamknox

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Now im not that much of a noob where i know only Nvidia cards come with Physx compatablity lol But what happends if you turn the feature on with an ATI card. Ive heard it slows the game down (fps wise) but would you still get same 'added effects' ? I decided to try this on mirrors edge earlier. When i turn on PhysX i get a pop up telling me my graphic card is not compatible with this feature and it may slow down the performance. Now you can read that two ways.
1: Your card will struggle as it doesnt have the right drivers to access the PhysX feature...
2: Turning this on will slow down your gaming performance with nothing added to it.
Ive also heard that it WOULD be possible for the game makers to make it work with ATI but are paid off by nvidia to only make it avalible to their products. is this true?
 
If you turn on PhysX with an ATI card in the system the processing is done entirely on the CPU - no physics processing is done on an ATI GPU.

Game developers "can't"* make GPU physx work with ATI cards even if nVidia let them.




* They could go to the trouble of writing their own CUDA<>OPENCL/DirectCompute wrapper or similiar which would be a whole different story and a massive project to take on.
 
Check out this article, shows that at least in this game, CPU physx is capped at 15 fps. I can vouch for it too, as Ive tried myself. The cpu isnt a bottleneck as its not being fully used.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum,2465.html

Im waiting for the day when NVIDIA get done for anti-competitive practices in regards to physx. Hopefully tho OpenCL will become bigger and we will have a universal platform for graphics AND physics for any gpu manufacturer
 
Physx will die off, every really popular destructible or large scale physics using game has basically been Havok, like Just Cause 2. Considering the massive list of successful titles that use Havok, the miniscule list that use Physx, that all the best games in terms of physics use Havok(best as in, most fun to play, sold most, considered the best games) and the fact that less good games that are deemed less successful that have used Physx have also been significantly slower due to Physx.

Really, I can't see the upside, and neither can seemingly anyone else. I mean Just Cause 2 had Nvidia involved in every which way, and they STILL decided to use Havok, largely because I think the same game, with the same detail and same gameplay and same feel, on Physx would have run slower and you get the impression the developer for that game, and MANY others all feel the same.

If it was better, and ran faster and was unmatched, its API would be used in every game and Havok would be nowhere, the opposite is true.

Personally I think Physx uptake is getting worse right now, and considering if it was successful it SHOULD be getting an ever increasing share of games its quite a huge failure.

As in, if Ageia had it in 5 games 5 years ago, 10 games 4 years ago, 40 games 3 years ago, it should have been in 100 games 2 years ago, and 200 games last year, etc, etc.

We're basically looking at a pathetic number of games that use the gpu accelerated physx, YEARS later when it should have sped up significantly, while Havok gets increasingly better game by game.

Physx has been on life support since 6 months after Ageia promised the world, Nvidia have just been pumping money into lots of over the top life saving equipment, eventually its going to die though, and its looking like quite soon now.
 
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that PhyX is dead and Havok will rule the world, a survey in GameDeveloper magazine suggests that PhysX is actually very well regarded by game developers.

http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/?p=88

Mafia 2 is going to use PhysX and Apex, if that is anything like the first game it will probably be the best game of 2010.

I think Havok and PhysX are both good, the more worrying thing in my opinion is that no game has really taken physics to the next level where everyone immediately says 'holy crap i have to have that'. Even with Half-Life 2 that tried to really integrate physics into the core game design, it got pretty boring fast.
 
p0rks0da said:
I think it's a bit of a stretch to say that PhyX is dead and Havok will rule the world, a survey in GameDeveloper magazine suggests that PhysX is actually very well regarded by game developers.

http://bulletphysics.org/wordpress/?p=88

Mafia 2 is going to use PhysX and Apex, if that is anything like the first game it will probably be the best game of 2010.

I think Havok and PhysX are both good, the more worrying thing in my opinion is that no game has really taken physics to the next level where everyone immediately says 'holy crap i have to have that'. Even with Half-Life 2 that tried to really integrate physics into the core game design, it got pretty boring fast.
Click to expand...

I think the context of this thread is PhysX GPU implementation & one good game popping up once a lifetime with it will not save it because that game will still be good without it.
 
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without a nvidia card, some games you can still use some sort of 'physx', take for example metro 2033, i was able to turn on advanced physics and the effects looked EXACTLY like my brothers with his nvidia. also cryostasis you can use hardware physics (you get all those nice water effects) with ati, although at slightly dropped framerates, and that was supposed to be a Phys-x game.
so that goes to show a ati system has the potential, just is cheated out on the fps for some reason (you'd think with quad cores the cpu should easily be able to handle physics) so imo something is going on there.
And yes, nvidia does pay game devs to use their systems to laugh at ati (look at cuda in just cause 2, thats truly very unfair what happens there as its only software related).
a few weeks ago i succesfully got my old 8800gt working as a physics card with my hd5870, 2 days later i took it out as there was really no point at all
 
Final8y said:
I think the context of this thread is PhysX GPU implementation & one good game popping up once a lifetime with it will not save it because that game will still be good without it.
Click to expand...

That's exactly my point though, all games that use Havok would be fine with another implementation too. Why would PhysX die completely even if GPU accelerated implementations don't ever become the norm?

'Bread and Butter' physics that almost all games have these days don't need a GPU at all, and they will run with Havok/PhysX/Bullet (or proprietary like Crytek for instance) on the CPU just fine.

Also i think 'one good game popping up in a lifetime' is not exactly accurate, there's a few good games that use PhysX.

Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Origins, Borderlands, Risen, Mafia 2 are some recent games.

It's not as if you can look at the Havok list here: http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=available-games and say 'oh my god that's amazing!'. The ratio of old/crap/unknown games vs top titles is not exactly great either.
 
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p0rks0da said:
That's exactly my point though, all games that use Havok would be fine with another implementation too. Why would PhysX die completely even if GPU accelerated implementations don't ever become the norm?

'Bread and Butter' physics that almost all games have these days don't need a GPU at all, and they will run with Havok/PhysX/Bullet (or proprietary like Crytek for instance) on the CPU just fine.

Also i think 'one good game popping up in a lifetime' is not exactly accurate, there's a few good games that use PhysX.

Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age Origins, Borderlands, Risen, Mafia 2 are some recent games.

It's not as if you can look at the Havok list here: http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=available-games and say 'oh my god that's amazing!'. The ratio of old/crap/unknown games vs top titles is not exactly great either.
Click to expand...


No one said that PhysX would die, they said the GPU PhysX will when you follow the context of the thread.
This is the second time that i have said GPU PhysX now, erm 3rd.
 
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Final8y said:
No one said that PhysX would die, they said the GPU PhysX will when you follow the context of the thread.
This is the second time that i have said GPU PhysX now, erm 3rd.
Click to expand...

Look at the post DM made right before mine, the very first line is 'Physx will die off'.
 
More games use PhysX (software) than use Havok, tho that gap is rapidly decreasing.

Very few games use GPU PhysX and that number if treading water at the moment - for every developer that drops off that bandwagon a new one jumps on... so its not going to die just yet.

Personally I'm dissapointed with the situations with GPU PhysX it has the potential to do things that absolutely are worth it and absolutely won't run on a modern CPU with playable performance but we won't see that for years even tho its possible now.
 
Rroff said:
More games use PhysX (software) than use Havok, tho that gap is rapidly decreasing.

Very few games use GPU PhysX and that number if treading water at the moment - for every developer that drops off that bandwagon a new one jumps on... so its not going to die just yet.

Personally I'm dissapointed with the situations with GPU PhysX it has the potential to do things that absolutely are worth it and absolutely won't run on a modern CPU with playable performance but we won't see that for years even tho its possible now.
Click to expand...

Yep. I think the sole reason GPU physics is not taking off is because 99% of development time/money is dedicated to the consoles, and neither of them support any kind of GPU acceleration. This is not going to change any time soon, so people should look at GPU PhysX for what it is, eye candy added to PC ports for Nvidia users that otherwise would not exist.

Unless Intel has a console win next generation with Larrabee (or Nvidia with whatever GPU they have out) then we won't see much change even then. Since Intel now own Havok, and ATI/NV GPU acceleration has been canned for that, all you basically have left is PhysX and Bullet for anything more than basic gameplay physics.
 
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p0rks0da said:
Look at the post DM made right before mine, the very first line is 'Physx will die off'.
Click to expand...

And then add the context of the thread & which is about GPU physx as if it was not for the GPU physx issue then there would not be any threads about physx specifically.
Also look at his reference to Ageia, he is talking about hardware physx & not CPU physx.

No one cares about what Games use what CPU physics engine, people only really care about its implementation.
 
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p0rks0da said:
Yep. I think the sole reason GPU physics is not taking off is because 99% of development time/money is dedicated to the consoles, and neither of them support any kind of GPU acceleration. This is not going to change any time soon, so people should look at GPU PhysX for what it is, eye candy added to PC ports for Nvidia users that otherwise would not exist.

Unless Intel has a console win next generation with Larrabee (or Nvidia with whatever GPU they have out) then we won't see much change even then. Since Intel now own Havok, and ATI/NV GPU acceleration has been canned for that, all you basically have left is PhysX and Bullet for anything more than basic gameplay physics.
Click to expand...

Yeah your right - consoles supporting hardware physics acceleration would make or break it.

metalmackey said:
Why would a developer use GPU PhysX that will only work on Nvidia cards when they could use DirectCompute on both ATI and Nvidia?
Click to expand...

Currently theres no worthwhile physics API for directcompute. But thats the whole problem - no developer is going to want to cut off a large chunk of their potential audience, especially when a lot of games are console centric as mentioned above, so its going to be a good few years down the line before we see this stuff.
 
So it kind of hinges on next gen consoles? When are they rumoured to be due for release? With the PlayStations longevity we could be waiting quite a bit longer before the next one.
 
Final8y said:
And then add the context of the thread & which is about GPU GPU physx as if it was not for the GPU physx issue then there would not be any threads about physx specifically.
No one cares about what Games use what CPU physics engine, people only really care about its implementation.
Click to expand...

He was obviously talking about CPU Physx else he wouldn't have compared it to Havok, because as i'm sure you're aware there is no GPU support for any vendor with Havok. It belongs to Intel now and they have canned support for ATI/NV acceleration, i expect it to be supported on Larrabee though, exactly as PhysX is with NV cards now.
 
Dirt 2 uses DirectCompute and has cloth and the water stuff. Batman and Mafia 2 seem just to have the same kind of effects (no actual GPU physics).
 
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