Nvidia Phsx with ATI Card

No, because the drivers will conflict

Many people have gotten it to run without the ATI/Nvidia bloatware conflicting. There is nothing preventing it otherwise. Although I wouldn't think it's worth the effort.

Ghost Recon 1 and 2 use it. I think Call of Duty 4 as well.

Wasn't there that rumour that you could just run physx with an ATI card but the guy was then asked to "help" nvidia get it working properly?

Yes. There is a small gorup of people working on the cuda package for ATi cards, but they said they wont work on the 48XX series until ATi provides them samples.

So, yes, ATi cards can run Physx without a problem.



My question is how much longer until drivers have the Havok physics with the drivers for ATi.

Has Physx EVER been relevant?

Yeah... but I think 3Dmark is even less important than Physx... if that's even possible.

may be TC:endwar will use it

I should have been more clear. I have seen the list (although not lately) and to my recolection, the list didn't contain many names that I knew or cared about. The list of games using Havoc or some other physics engine based on the CPU is much larger and contains many more impressive games.

Yes in XP; but currently not very easily in Vista (they're monkeying with a hack) mainly due to WDDM driver limitation to one graphics driver.

Yes the funny thing about that is that, while GRAW is a poster child for PhysX, Havoc was the underlying engine for the game physics (not the visual physics) and for UT3 it's Epic own physics engine.

Both Havoc and PhysX are good, just nothing from either has really been too exciting really. It's like arguing who has the bigger pile of dung, sure one may have better numbers, but it's still Cr@p !

So then, where do you think physics engines will fit into to game devolpement in the future? If we can all see that PhysX (propriatary hardware based) isn't taking off, do you think it will be a software (thus CPU driven) item in the future?

I don't really care if there is a standard or if different deveolpers make their own. I just don't want to have to buy a speciallized piece of hardware for some games, but not most. If they want to standardize it to work with all modern gaming-level GPU's then that is fine.

Hatman... what the heck else does it help you with besides games?

Great .... in the future.
Right now they are doing what they do with new DX graphics toys, Oooh look shiny $h1t. PhysX tornados and ragdolls that are a tiny bit more realistic doesn't really impress me. Bullet drop and chain reaction kinetics are when I'll care more than what the CPU can currently emulate or estimate even if not 100% realiastic or accurate.

Actually I think the push towards a DX11 compute shader or OpenCL physics implementation is the way to go. Get beyond the proprietary crap and let ATi, intel, nVidia, S3/Via, etc get into the action without prejudice, that's what I want and hope for.

Sure intel's Massively-Multi-Core future may help the CPU side of things, but you have to think that the many hundred compute units in modern VPU/GPUs would be handy for stuff.

However it's still very immature, and if you were a developer would you really base your entire game development from the ground up on any option right now? I think in about 2-3 years we'll see it more integral, for now they both tend to just do the hey look at that effect over there, not the hey look at everything everywhere it's vital to the engine.

Things may change quicker or slower than I expect, but I wouldn't be making any purchaes right now unless a specific game or effect makes it worthwhile for the individual.
Heck if it was even 'shiny-physis' in Oblivion, I might have changed my strategy about purchases, but really, even Fallout3 or FC2 wouldn't be enough for me to care and worry about changing hardware of one kind or another (whether it was a different CPU, GPU or even platform).

Does anyone really care about Folding at home? I'm not of the opinion that because I have a decent graphics card that I am going to cure cancer when my computer is idle.

Most people think of physics effects rather than gameplay physics, i recall people stating how you needed a physx card to do proper cloth movement and made a big deal of it but most people would be okay with the type of cloth simulation offered by source or oblivion's engine. Same goes for alot of things, it do't have to be perfect as long as it is there.


Also Ape, strange you mention bullet drop as what's wrong with the way it is done now in games that use it? not accurate enough?

ahh, quite a lot of realism, some games do have ballistics, one of my favourtie online games is red orchestra which does have bullet drop and a free aim system. Bullets lose speed and hitting a part of the body is not just x amount of points i.e a rifle shot to the arm and a single hit by an smg does not equal a kill because it reaches a hundred points like in dod:s.

That was done using a modified unreal 2 engine i believe and so we will see what tripewire the dev's can do with the unreal 3 engine when their new game comes out, i would imagine it will have more possibilities like penetration of materials for one which is a bit difficult apparantly.

Thanks, forgot about that.

PhysX has the power to do what you ask, but again, no game is fully coded exclusivly with PhysX, which holds it back. I want the same things you do. I want every piece of shrapnal from an explosion to be its own object, with its own momentum, and capable of killing people. Hovok can not do this, due to the massive ammounts of CPU time it would take to perform these calculations.

For full physics, the work must be taken off the CPU. Anyone who claims you can get realsitic physics like I explained above using just CPU time needs to have their head examined.

Yes you can do it, they are the core engine for many other games , just not the ones they always highlite which use their competitor's engine or a proprietary engine. That they chose only the shiny add-on and not the physX engine as their core shows their trust in PhysX from the start. That may change over time, but will it matter before there's a more open API is the question. Making a game all out of GPU-PhysX is a huge task, which is why they don't do it, but it's not because it can't be done.

For full physics, the work must be taken off the CPU. Anyone who claims you can get realsitic physics like I explained above using just CPU time needs to have their head examined.[/quote]

It's no different be it a terascale CPU or GPU, other than the communication is quicker on the CPU, the advantage of the GPU is cost per op.

No matter what there needs to be co-processor to CPU communication, so the advantage depends alot on the implementation, and while Havok doesn't do GPU physics right now, don't expect that to be so once Larrabee is out. It's not a limitation of Havok, it's a limitation of the implemetation that intel is providing for Havok. Moving to a more open platform lets people like Crytek and Epic continue to build their own underlying engines instead of being stuck to whatever this or that IHV let them use.

The reason you can run havok on a CPU is because only a few things at any given time need to have a physics calculation performed; we're not at the point where every individual object needs to have every external effect in the game calculated upon it.

Its like having a wooden box between three bombs that go off at .05 seconds apart. A full physics API would do the following:

1: Caclulate each bombs effect on the box, throwing off pieces in the process
2: Calculate each physics for each piece that broke off the box (probably thousands)
3: Calculate the bombs effect on each other (well beyond what you can do in labs at this point, even I won't be asking for this anytime soon).
4: Calculate the effect every breakoff piece of the box has on the environment (wooden shards are quite destructive at high speeds )

Point 2 is why I believe a full physics API can not be done on the CPU. In terms of calculations per second, the amount of work done would be well beyond what even a highly clocked i7 would be able to do. There isn't enough processing power to calculate physics effects on thousands of objects, that can fully interact, every single moment they exist, in a fully dynamic environment. Now, if those shards moved in a linear manner (like what most engines do with bullet drop), you can cheat a bit and store the necessary calcuatlion for quick access and easy computation. But a dynamic physics system, where the forces acting on objects is not constant, requires significantly more work (look at point 3 as an example, the formula for how explosion 3 acts while two other explosions are acting on it can take a lot of CPU time just to figure out).

I don't even think a dedicated physics card can do what I ask for now, but I do want to see some of this stuff start to get implemented. Right now, we are starting to be able to blow a hole in a wall (in a few games at least). Next is getting the falling debris to crush someone...