http://community.codemasters.com/fo...-1317/401137-sli-please-codies-some-news.html
if you want more threads look for yourself. Nvidia is not like ati so they will not go crying around to make themselves look like the good guys. smaller games get less support? yeah games like Cryostasis, Mirrors edge, the dark void are all bigger blockbusters than Modern warfare 2.
Nvidia has openly claimed physx to be open for licensing and they cant suddenly deny it to ati.
Another laughable comment from you regarding stalker series. The original Stalker is the most critically acclaimed of the series and the release with the least bugs that the community loved to work with. Ati took over added pointless graphics features and made Clear sky which was simply unplayable at the beginning and ran worse than Crysis. Even after more than 5 patches and immense efforts from the community Stalker Clear sky is still full of bugs and crap performance. On the other hand Stalker SOC with mods has great graphics with much better performance and its considered as a classic. Clearly... Good job ati!
Oh my word its getting a little embarassing, firstly Stalker clear sky LAUNCHED as an Nvidia title, as did the buggy piece of crap that was the original stalker, also mercilessly ripped in reviews for being unstable. AFTER the 2nd game was released, after Nvidia gave up on it the team went to AMD, who didn't all themselves, but very much helped to turn the game around and introduced useful dx10.1 effects and also useful dx11 usage. I don't remember claiming it was a great or fantastic looking game Rroff, however isn't it worse than an older worse looking game is buggy as hell, than a bleeding edge game with all new tech, yet Nvidia helped make a buggy disasterous old looking bad game, while AMD fixed it and introduced bleeding edge stuff, with no issues? It actually looks very good, but is another example of one thing, power, accuracy, doesn't mean good. It misused its power, the first one IIRC was around the time HDR went through the roof, there was a period of time when everyone loved HDR, it was one of the "in" things to add, and they went crrrrazzzy with it, HDR up the yingyang, with crappy grass sprites all over the place. ITs an engine that needs a lot of power to run, but simply wastes most of that power on completely unnecessary things that barely improve the game as a whole...... wonder what else that sounds like(starts with a P, ends with an X........ as hys in the middle).
AS for claiming Physx was open to licencing, everything on the planet is open to licencing, yes you can actually say anyones welcome to use it, then say no when specific people ask you, please go and learn about business. Again your theory that you HAVE to licence a proprietary technology to someone, if they merely ask.......... is laughable, ridiculous and the entire business world would collapse if it were true. AS said AMD would merely need to publically ask Intel for a licence to produce a I7, and should Intel refuse they'd get sued for anti-trust......... garbage, utter garbage.
I really have no idea what your point of smaller games was, Mirror's edge wasn't a small game, it was a Nvidia AAA title, it was a showcase for Physx, it was one of their biggest games for that tech in the year, Cryostasis, IIRC< was another big physx title(small title in general but a big physx title) hence Nvidia's large involvement, both sucked balls.
Physx, is useless, its not in any way more powerful than Havok, or anything else, it has more power AVAILABLE FOR IT TO RUN ON, which is a completely different thing.
ALl physics engines are writen to be scalable, as is Havok, give it hardware acceleration and it can add more detail to its calculations, but they, Intel and anyone with any knowledge knows its literally a waste of power.
Physics being useful and accurate in a game is entirely down to the implemenation by design and coding, very very little to do with physics engines which are, in reality very simple, they model real world physics, something anyone with a degree in physics coupled with a guy who can code can produce. Theres nothing magical about Physx, its literally simple physics.
AS Batman will show you, the touted massively accurate physx, gives you lots of effects that pass right through Batman, something many games without physx has managed to avoid. How did that happen, quite simply bad implementation of a supposed fantastic physx engine, so what can we very simply learn? Take the single most accurate and power hungry physx engine famed for its accuracy, put it in the hands of Nvidia's own engineers in a team working to code for a company, and you get badly coded effects that don't work as they should.
Its 99.9999999% about the team, the design and the actual coding done in the game and 0.0000001% about the engine used. The right code and design would have those pieces of paper that drift around in Batman stop and not pass through Batman, the difference between Havok estimating it in 1/100th of the power that Physx uses to get an accurate number, is an imposible to see visually distant between where the paper would interact with the character rather than pass right through.
You've got TWO sets of "physics" code in a game, the top layer, which is purely game design, nothing to do with maths, or actual physics, is the design layer of physics, its the layer that tells a particle what the game wants it to do. Once the game has decided what it wants a piece of paper to do THEN it uses Havok/Physx to calculate the numbers involved.
The problem is, every single major bump in interactive physics comes in that top layer, its a design layer, how you come up with the number 7, or 32 after you decide what the piece of paper does is almost completely irrelevant. Also pointless is if that number came back as 7 on Havok, and 7.010205057473498 from Physx, you won't see any difference on screen.
