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Your graphic card mistakes..

2900XT, such a big mistake.

Oh yes and really early on, had a Geforce 5200FX with 128mb of ram, went to PC world and came out with an upgrade, 5200Fx with 256mb ram.
 
I still have one!

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Nvidia killed it. It was much better being hardware driven and now phyx is pretty much vapourware :/
 
I haven't seen a new game launch with it in ages. According to the Wiki, the last two game to launch with PhysX was Landmark, and Ghost in the Shell in 2016, and both shutdown in 2017.
It's been 4 years since a game launched with PhysX it seems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_with_hardware-accelerated_PhysX_support

Who in their right mind is going to waste time updating that page.

Apex legends has physx as do many other newly released games.

So how do you explain that it isn't on that list?
 
Who in their right mind is going to waste time updating that page.

Apex legends has physx as do many other newly released games.

So how do you explain that it isn't on that list?

Can you give me a list of games? Not sure what Apex Legends was until you mentioned it there. Looking it up, not showing what the effects are either. Just getting troubleshooting threads about it.

NVIDIA's own website don't list Apex Legends as a PhysX game either.
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/physx/games

Out of the AAA, and other games I've seen launch lately, not seen PhysX advertised or shown much.

So if I can't go by the Wiki, or Nvidia how can I trust you saying many newly released games have PhysX?
Is it expected to physically look at each, and every possible game that launches to check with their developers if they have PhysX?
 
There are are 3 time periods of PhysX. The first was when the PPU launched by Ageia before they were bought by nVidia. Drivers were called 1.x.x. and it was pretty poor performing but had promise. nVidia then bought them and transferred PhysX to work on their GPU's. You could still use the PPU but it was just to slow even back then. Drivers were 2.x.x if i recall correctly. CPU acceleration was possible but way to slow with the v2 of physx. Nowadays we are in version 3 i believe of PhysX, its widely used but not a selling feature anymore per say. Its accelerated mostly by CPU with some rare occasions where some titles will use it for more. An example of this would be Warframe that has particle effects accelerated by PhysX and the extreme mode of this can only be enabled though GPU acceleration on a Geforce GPU. It's pretty much on the same level as the Havok physics engine unless a developer feels like going nuts and locking features off to some of their customers. Many times if you take a look in the bin folder of a game or where ever the executable is located you will find PhysX dll bundled along and no mentioning anywhere that it's used even though it is. The spanking new Mount & blade 2 Bannerlord uses PhysX.

TL;DR: PhysX is still in use today in new titles but for the most part is used the same way as someone using the Havok engine. Pretty much under the radar.
 
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TL;DR: PhysX is still in use today in new titles but for the most part is used the same way as someone using the Havok engine. Pretty much under the radar.

Looking into it, it seems Unity, and Unreal Engine use PhysX as a base. Even so very few actually use the fancy effects. Borderlands 2 uses PhysX for cloth, liquid, and debris; and Borderlands 3 running PhysX as the base physics engine can't even match the effects in 2. As in, it's totally lacking cloth physics where you can tear, and blow it apart. It's missing liquids, and viscous liquids from weapons; and it's missing gun casing, and environmental debris from explosions, and guns shots.

It's a realy shame; as you should be able to use to run the better effects if you wanted to.
 
Can you give me a list of games? Not sure what Apex Legends was until you mentioned it there. Looking it up, not showing what the effects are either. Just getting troubleshooting threads about it.

NVIDIA's own website don't list Apex Legends as a PhysX game either.
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/physx/games

Out of the AAA, and other games I've seen launch lately, not seen PhysX advertised or shown much.

So if I can't go by the Wiki, or Nvidia how can I trust you saying many newly released games have PhysX?
Is it expected to physically look at each, and every possible game that launches to check with their developers if they have PhysX?


I'm not going to waste my time categorising all my library into physx or not but when I launch games like Apex I see PhysX powered by nvidia on the launch screen. That's enough to tell me games do use it and new games too.
 
2900XT, such a big mistake.

Oh yes and really early on, had a Geforce 5200FX with 128mb of ram, went to PC world and came out with an upgrade, 5200Fx with 256mb ram.

Hah I remember a friend RMAing their top model Ti4800 and getting a 5200 in replacement and having a nightmare with the retailer "but its newer so must be better".
 
I've been buying cards for over 20 years and there aren't many genuine regrets or mistakes. I'd say the closest thing to a mistake was buying an AGP 6800 and then doing a platform upgrade to PCI-E not long after, which meant I had to sell it and buy a replacement (6800GT). In hindsight I should've stuck with my old AGP card (9800SE AIW modded to Pro) a bit longer until I changed motherboard.

If I'm being overly harsh I could maybe say:
-3dfx Voodoo Graphics. Was a massive leap forward from 2d cards, but I bought it quite late in the day, when Voodoo2 was already out. I was a student so the idea of spending £200 on a graphics card seemed crazy. The problem with the V1 was it just wasn't really fast enough, and couldn't handle Quake3 properly when that came out. In hindsight, I should've just bought a voodoo2, but I didn't have the internet back then so it was quite hard to do research, and I'd have potentially faced a cpu bottleneck initially anyway.
-GF2MX (Hercules edition with faster VRAM). Was an OK card, in fact I kept it for about 2 years i think (quite long back in the days of rapid development) HOWEVER when it came to raw performance in 16bit mode it was only about 20% faster than the voodoo3 it replaced, not really a big performance gain.
-8800GTS-320. Actually a good card, but it was a mistake in the sense that the 8800GTX was an absolute beast with a very long lifespan, so I wish I'd got one of those instead.

I guess the lesson I should learn is to maybe think a bit more long term with my purchases, and spend more money rather than hunting for value.
 
Hah I remember a friend RMAing their top model Ti4800 and getting a 5200 in replacement and having a nightmare with the retailer "but its newer so must be better".

I almost bought a 5200 in PC World to replace my Ti4800SE! Retailer also nearly convinced me it was better, since it's newer, and high number.

I think anyone buying an FX 5000 series card, or MX 2 fits in here. :p
 
Looking into it, it seems Unity, and Unreal Engine use PhysX as a base. Even so very few actually use the fancy effects. Borderlands 2 uses PhysX for cloth, liquid, and debris; and Borderlands 3 running PhysX as the base physics engine can't even match the effects in 2. As in, it's totally lacking cloth physics where you can tear, and blow it apart. It's missing liquids, and viscous liquids from weapons; and it's missing gun casing, and environmental debris from explosions, and guns shots.

It's a realy shame; as you should be able to use to run the better effects if you wanted to.
problem with borderlands 2 for example was that the PhysX performance even on the lowest GPU accelerated setting was troublesome at best in certain areas of the game. We are talking 30ish fps on top end hardware released years after game release.

It's a bit sad that nVidia didn't want to open up the garden a bit and allow mixing of GPUs(amd/nvidia) to accelerate PhysX cause the tech is pretty cool when you look at the tech demos of it. Then again the results from offloading the physx to a dedicated GPU wasn't the best and usually required the same GPU or a tier below of the main renderer or the performance would tank.
 
No major mistake, only slight regret. Picked up Trio of EVGA SC Titan X's. Managed to wreck the rear PCB of one (still worked) so could not refund when the 980Ti was revealed two days after for significantly less for same performance.
 
problem with borderlands 2 for example was that the PhysX performance even on the lowest GPU accelerated setting was troublesome at best in certain areas of the game. We are talking 30ish fps on top end hardware released years after game release.

It's a bit sad that nVidia didn't want to open up the garden a bit and allow mixing of GPUs(amd/nvidia) to accelerate PhysX cause the tech is pretty cool when you look at the tech demos of it. Then again the results from offloading the physx to a dedicated GPU wasn't the best and usually required the same GPU or a tier below of the main renderer or the performance would tank.


I played through BL2 last year, and you're right. Even my Titan V at 3440x1440 would hit low FPS after a while if you went overboard with Torgue explosive weapons.
I know NV have opened up more and more Gameworks; but like you said, a real shame PhysX wasn't/isn't accessible on AMD. I know it was briefly, but that got closed up quickly.

It's just a shame few developers, and even NVIDIA don't do much more with PhysX. They're working on version 5.0; but I;ve not seen anything substantial using it in ages.
https://news.developer.nvidia.com/announcing-nvidia-physx-sdk-5-0/

Apprently Apex Legends uses it, but I can't find much on what it does. Even Borderlands 3 that uses Unreal Engine 3, and uses PhysX as teh default physics engine can't even compare to effects in BL2; as messy as performance can be on it.
 
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