Unreal Engine 4 GPU physics for the mass

[shankly1985]

Unreal Engine 4 will also make GPU based physics for the mass do you think we will start seeing this much more of engines coding in there own system in the future?
Been playing Squad and this game is using GPU for its physics system. I thought it looks really good from my playing time. It wasn't until I came across a new thread on there forum from a guy asking about PhysX.

Here a reply from Squad Dev, to my reply.
me: But what about people not using Nvidia GPU? Will they loose out on effects? In my playing and watching videos etc I dont see anything am missing out on?

RoyAwesome: No. Epic implemented their own system for GPU driven particles and compute things. It works exactly the same as PhysX, but it's not brand specific.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Resources/ContentExamples/EffectsGallery/1_D/index.html

This brings me back to comments in the Batman thread and performance you loose when running these GameWorks effect, why is it that games that have built in effect performance isn't effected?
Alien Isolation did GPU physics particles with outstanding performance all round.

Am starting to see GameWorks as more of a start the ball rolling type of tech like Gsync and Mantle from AMD set a foundation and let other follow for the better.

7min in you can see GPU particles not over done just a nice touch

 

[Rroff]

UE4 has very specific solvers for specific physics effects i.e. particle physics - PhysX is a complete physics simulation package that can handle stuff not even seen in any game or demo yet hence it can't compete in some cases performance wise against solutions that are optimised for doing one thing well.

nVidia has been porting out some of the more useful stuff from PhysX to the FleX pipeline ( https://developer.nvidia.com/flex ) which isn't limited to nVidia GPUs and generally has much better performance for specific features than PhysX.

 

[shankly1985]

UE4 has very specific solvers for specific physics effects i.e. particle physics - PhysX is a complete physics simulation package that can handle stuff not even seen in any game or demo yet hence it can't compete in some cases performance wise against solutions that are optimised for doing one thing well.

nVidia has been porting out some of the more useful stuff from PhysX to the FleX pipeline ( https://developer.nvidia.com/flex ) which isn't limited to nVidia GPUs and generally has much better performance for specific features than PhysX.

I learn something new.. Flex I like the idea of this not being limited to Nvidia GPUs. But that just makes my point more clear about PhysX setting a standard and then evolving into something else for the mass. It has to be done.
PC gaming should be enjoyed by everyone, locking out users just because of a GPU they own is very wrong. So well done to Nvidia taking on Flex.