• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Nvidia PhysX FLEX

Gregster

Gregster

Gregster

Caporegime
Joined
24 Sep 2008
Posts
38,284
Location
Essex innit!
As seen in TWIMTBP in Montreal, Nvidia have released some more info about the upcoming Flex. It is to be a stand alone tech and independent of PhysX. This looks very promising to me and will be working alongside PhysX 3.3.x for early adopters and then included in PhysX 3.4 as a first class feature.


PhysXInfo.com: So what is the NVIDIA FLEX exactly ? What are the main features of FLEX ?

Miles Macklin: FLEX is a multi-physics solver for visual effects.

It grew out of the work I did on Position Based Fluids, which was later extended to support two-way coupling between liquids and different object types such as clothing and rigid bodies.

The feature set is largely inspired by tools like Maya’s nCloth and Softimage’s Lagoa. The goal is to bring the capabilities of these off-line applications to real-time games.


The types of materials that FLEX is designed to simulate are:
  • Liquids (water, goo)
  • Granular materials (sand, dirt)
  • Environmental cloth (flags, newspapers)
  • Rigid bodies (environmental debris)
  • Soft bodies (inflatables / tetrahedral meshes)
  • The solver uses a unified representation for all these material types,
  • which means they can interact with each other in a fully coupled way.
However this unified representation also comes with some limitations. It wouldn’t, for instance, be suitable to use for a character controller, or ray-casts. Those would still be better suited to a traditional rigid body physics engine.

Some key Q&A's :)

PhysXInfo.com: Is collision detection in FLEX re-using some of the PhysX SDK algorithms, or is it completely new pipeline?

Miles Macklin: It is a separate solver and does not share the collision detection pipeline with PhysX.

That means you can use FLEX by itself (independent of PhysX) but need to manually mirror collision objects into FLEX for them to interact. FLEX supports most standard collision primitives to make this easy.

When FLEX is integrated into PhysX 3.4, manual mirroring will not be required.

PhysXInfo.com: Will FLEX support cross-PhysX SDK and/or APEX interactions? For example, can FLEX liquid crush a destructible asset?

Miles Macklin: Two-way coupling between different materials works best when they are all part of the same solver, but in theory you could use a FLEX liquid to affect a traditional destruction asset with some code to arbitrate between the two.

PhysXInfo.com: Are the authoring tools planned for FLEX? Is it going to support LOD and scalability features, similar to APEX?

Miles Macklin: It is likely that we will build authoring tools into at least one major game engine. I expect higher-level features like LOD will be built on-top of the core solver library.

PhysXInfo.com: Is FLEX purely GPU accelerated library, or will it support CPU execution? Is it plausible to see FLEX ported to OpenCL or DirectCompute?

Miles Macklin: Right now we have a CUDA implementation and a DirectCompute implementation is planned. We are considering a CPU implementation.

I have also built FLEX for Linux (Ubuntu 12.04 64bit) and it works great, in some cases it is faster than Windows.

PhysXInfo.com: Are you planning to release FLEX for third-party developers? Is it going to be included in PhysX SDK or APEX package, or available as stand-alone SDK?

Miles Macklin: It will be initially available as a stand-alone SDK that can be used alongside PhysX 3.3.x for a select group of early adopters, and later FLEX will become a first-class feature of PhysX 3.4.

I often say that FLEX is a low-level library because the core solver interface is very minimal (a single C header file). So users who want just the solver can embed that into their applications and build tools on top of it, or they can use the tools we develop inside of PhysX / APEX.

PhysXInfo.com: What future have you prepared for FLEX – computer games or computer graphics?

Miles Macklin: Initially we’ll see FLEX in games, but I am particularly interested to see if we can apply it in offline graphics as well.

To date, NVIDIA FLEX looks like a huge leap for GPU accelerated physics, but will it gain enough momentum to become really popular? Time will tell.
Click to expand...

  • a
  • s
 
Seen it all before tbh, PhysX demos in an empty scene touting 60fps then nowhere to be seen in games ever.

I was expecting more than the usual from NV after Mantle's announcement. :/
 
No doubt locked to Nvidia, half the market can't use it, and taken up by 1 or 2 games a year.

Meh....
 
Last edited:
I bet the guy who runs physxinfo.com is a busy man :p
bhxx.jpg
 
Fantastic, stuff, looking forward to see it in action.

Bottom line, whether you are against it because of the lockout on AMD, you are not a true PC enthusiast if you can't be honest enough to admit it is very impressive as AMD haven't displayed anything remotely like this sort of stuff at all.:)

d_brennen said:
I bet the guy who runs physxinfo.com is a busy man :p
bhxx.jpg
Click to expand...

Still laughing.:D
 
tommybhoy said:
Fantastic, stuff, looking forward to see it in action.

Bottom line, whether you are against it because of the lockout on AMD, you are not a true PC enthusiast if you can't be honest enough to admit it is very impressive as AMD haven't displayed anything remotely like this sort of stuff at all.:)



Still laughing.:D
Click to expand...


I would like to see what the difference is between this and whats Physics are use in games where its not call Nvidia PhysX.

Boarder Lands 2 had some interesting effects but that was a game crying out for the imagination to run wild given its cartoon nature, it delivered on that, i'm not convinced the same thing could not have been done with Havoc or Bullet.

Other games like the Metro series, Planet Side 2 ecte... i don't see anything thats not in BF4, Crysis 3 and the like.

The question for me is, does it have to be Nvidia, or AMD? don't we already have what they have minus the brand ties?
 
Last edited:
Orangey said:
Seen it all before tbh, PhysX demos in an empty scene touting 60fps then nowhere to be seen in games ever.

I was expecting more than the usual from NV after Mantle's announcement. :/
Click to expand...

This tbh. How many times have we seen small items dropping from height and interacting with surfaces? Boring...
 
BaDBoY_uK said:
This tbh. How many times have we seen small items dropping from height and interacting with surfaces? Boring...
Click to expand...

This reminds me of the initial demo for PS2. Ducks dropping from the sky and interracting with real-looking water.

I'd like to see this in a game.
 
almighty15 said:
Waste of time..... OpenCL is really going to come into it's own over the next couple of years thanks to the next generation consoles.

PhysX is dead..
Click to expand...


I'll be very surprised if next generation consoles make anything really come into it's own. Let alone advanced physics effects.

PhysX isn't dead, people have been saying that for the last 3 years. It's getting really boring.
 
MjFrosty said:
I'll be very surprised if next generation consoles make anything really come into it's own. Let alone advanced physics effects.

PhysX isn't dead, people have been saying that for the last 3 years. It's getting really boring.
Click to expand...
When you can count the number of decent games using PhysX to a good extent on both hands in the last 3 years, it's at the very least a little ill.
 
humbug said:
No doubt locked to Nvidia, half the market can't use it, and taken up by 1 or 2 games a year.

Meh....
Click to expand...

I almost hate myself for saying this, but the same could be said for mantle. Only time will tell.

Obviously locked to AND not Nvidia;)
 
bru said:
I almost hate myself for saying this, but the same could be said for mantle. Only time will tell.

Obviously locked to AND not Nvidia;)
Click to expand...

And so you should seeing as the context is clear for the amount of time that GPU PhysX has been out, but hey just put that fact a side for the sake of making a comment.
 
I agree with a lot of the comments here and would like to see PhysX more in games. One thing people are failing to read or not understanding it, is Directcompute support as well as Cuda support.

This could very well be seen running on AMD GPU's as well As Nvidia in the future. :)
 
If it's independent of PhysX and can run on AMD GPUs without stupid licence terms, then it'd get used and would be good to have.

Is PhysX used to any extent in any games where nvidia hasn't paid them to use it?
 
teppic said:
If it's independent of PhysX and can run on AMD GPUs without stupid licence terms, then it'd get used and would be good to have.

Is PhysX used to any extent in any games where nvidia hasn't paid them to use it?
Click to expand...

It will be independent of PhysX.

As far as I am aware, Nvidia have devs that get involved in implementing PhysX into the games that use it (AAA titles). I have no idea about payments or care in truth.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom