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First Look: Unreal Tournament 3 With PhysX

Pottsey

Pottsey

Pottsey

Soldato
Joined
29 May 2006
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I thought this might be interesting as a lot of people think this is going be either the final nail in the coffin or the game that saves the Ageia PPU,.
Copy and paste from

http://www.planetphysx.com/weblog/archives/2007/08/first_look_unreal_tournament_3.html#more

“Here's a sneek peek of an Unreal Tournament 3 mod built to show what kind of stuff the PPU can do in the game. This clip is from the Leipzig Games Conference.
More After The Jump
It looks like we're seeing destructible environments that effect game play. For example you can see the scene where the roof is cleared in order to allow for a clean sniper shot. The tornado also tears through the level creating obstacles on the fly which is a bit different.“

http://www.ageia.com/physx/ut3.html Ageia own UT 3 page.
 
I was under the impession that graphics card manufacturers are including this now on graphics cards?
 
Farore said:
I was under the impession that graphics card manufacturers are including this now on graphics cards?
Click to expand...

Not yet.

With the advent of programmable pixel pipelines it was noted that the GPUs have plenty of floating point capacity with which to handle game physics. While ATI and nvidia are both undoubtedly working on this, there is no standardised format for implemetation. Realistically it will be next year at the earliest for GPU physics, and a while after that before games adapt it.

The alternative approach is utilising 'spare' CPU cores (another very realistic option for physics implementation, especially since the number of cores is set only to increase).
 
yes so was i, i thought the cards had been desighned to have a built in type of physx so as to eliminate the need for them
 
damian666 said:
yes so was i, i thought the cards had been desighned to have a built in type of physx so as to eliminate the need for them
Click to expand...

Nvidia's marketing department would be proud :D

But no - not yet.
 
Yes GPU do have builtin physics support but no games support it and there’s no evidence it can do anything put effects physics. It looks like it cannot do Gameplay Physics.
 
Pottsey said:
Yes GPU do have builtin physics support but no games support it and there’s no evidence it can do anything put effects physics. It looks like it cannot do Gameplay Physics.
Click to expand...

The cards have programmable pixel pipelines. You can get them to do anything you want. Heard of CUDA? http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html

But that isn't to say they have "built in physics support" any more than they have 'built in support' to solve second order partial differential equations. They have the capacity to solve them both though, if programmed correctly.

no evidence it can do anything put effects physics. It looks like it cannot do Gameplay Physics
Click to expand...
That makes no sense whatsoever. As with other hardware they are capable of doing whatever they are programmed to do, it's just a question of floating point performance.
 
“That makes no sense whatsoever. As with other hardware they are capable of doing whatever they are programmed to do, it's just a question of floating point performance.”
GPU physics are done by Havok FX which is effects physics only. As Havok FX is the API used and its limited to effects physics I think its fair to say GPU’s are also limited to effects physics. No games do anything different with GPU physics. It might change in a few years but Havok FX has been out almost 2 years now and it doesn’t look like its going be changed to do game play physics any time soon.
 
“Is this a marketing term for Physics computations that existed before the invention of computers?”
It's not a marketing tearm it a technical team. It’s a term Havok invented as far as I can tell and as it’s very useful so others started to use it. It don’t think it was in use pre 2000.
 
Don't attack Pottsey on every single thing he says :)

He's right for now at least. Effects physics = physics seen by the user that cannot be interacted with in any way. Water splashing over rocks where the splash patterns do not change if you throw a rock at it for instance. Game play physics = stuff you can see, manipulate and then see an effect based on that manipulation.

Last time I read about GPU based physics, it would only be used for effects, but I haven't really been keeping up on it.
 
if physics is all dwn to raw FPS performance... amd's new chips might have a trick up their sleaves, what with the suposed "huge" floating point performance boosts they offer.

Edit

core 0+1 handling gfx and ai threads, core 2 on sound core 3 on gameplay physics and gfx on effects physics and rendering...?
 
I actually don't think those physics in that video are that great - most notably the "destructable terrain" parts.

I mean, when the guy shoots the wall, instead of blowing a hole in it, the bricks just appear to fall over. Doesn't look close to "realistic" IMO.
 
Nice one Pottsey, those effects look pretty cool. I especially thought the whirlwind effect was spectacular, imagine a Start Wars game with those sort of physics

Even those of you that don't like PPUs have to admit (a) it a big market out there and (b) Ageia's product will drive alternative products, whether they are on GPU, on CPU, or separate.
 
Last edited:
Amonlym said:
if physics is all dwn to raw FPS performance... amd's new chips might have a trick up their sleaves, what with the suposed "huge" floating point performance boosts they offer.

Edit

core 0+1 handling gfx and ai threads, core 2 on sound core 3 on gameplay physics and gfx on effects physics and rendering...?
Click to expand...
That would require a lot of multi-threaded code to tie it all together. Things get very complicated, bordering on the impossible when you take into consideration time and money constraints most companies have to work with.
 
I didn't actually see anything in that video that hasn't already been showed running on a standard CPU in Crysis. The tornado looked good at first but did no one else notice the fact that all the bits weren't actually physically effected. They clipped straight through the wall in front of the player without affecting it in any way.

I'll stick to my CPU thanks ;)

For the price of a standard CPU and this PPU unit you can easily get a quadcore instead that can dedicate two much more powerful cores just for the physics if you wanted.
 
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