PhysX now available

teppic · 13 Oct 2014 at 18:10

Nvidia has finally made GPU PhysX available for Linux. I don't think there's been any formal announcement.

Hopefully this means that upcoming AAA games will now be using it in their Linux versions.

stopper · 13 Oct 2014 at 19:32

Just saw this earlier.
Good news, but they want to concentrate on their current drivers first. screen tearing on ubuntu and mint right now is horrible.

teppic · 13 Oct 2014 at 19:40

Do you use the latest drivers via xorg-edgers? I've not had tearing problems myself.

stopper · 13 Oct 2014 at 20:50

I use the software updates (additional drivers) to install the proprietary drivers.
Are you a gamer? because it is only during gaming, and especially with Source games.

teppic · 13 Oct 2014 at 20:55

I'd try enabling the xorg-edgers repository as it has the latest drivers, the official ones are old. The details are here:

https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

That's assuming you're on nvidia, this doesn't have up to date AMD drivers.

I've only tested gaming lately with Linux, but I did try Half Life 2 and Left for Dead 2 and didn't see any problems.

stopper · 13 Oct 2014 at 22:07

Yeah I'm on Nvidia.
I haven't tried the 343 drivers yet so thanks for that, I'll give it a shot.

teppic · 14 Oct 2014 at 11:37

There was talk of keeping up to date drivers in the official repositories but it never happened. It's especially bad for people who want to stay on the LTS release.

Hopefully it's pretty easy to implement PhysX in Linux for games that have it in Windows, as it uses the same development kit. That'd mean improvements in quite a few - the Metro games, Borderlands, etc.

stopper · 14 Oct 2014 at 14:11

So far so good with the 343 drivers, haven't fully tested them yet but I can already see a massive performance increase. Will know for sure when I stream next.
The problem was/is the vsync which should have been fixed in 340 (one of the first fixes in patch notes), but it still didn't work.

teppic · 14 Oct 2014 at 19:56

So the tearing thing is fixed with the 343 drivers?

stopper · 16 Oct 2014 at 13:35

teppic said:
So the tearing thing is fixed with the 343 drivers?

No the drivers didn't fix it, in the end it was a problem with Unity, I've installed Lubuntu now and all tearing has disapeared.

teppic · 16 Oct 2014 at 14:59

Ah. I've actually tested mostly under Mint, which doesn't use Unity.

I wish Steam officially supported Arch, as that always has the latest of everything.