Why Physx is a waste of time!!

[Start Rant] It is just another pointless feature for the vast majority of gamers. The first thing is that most people will only have ONE graphics card in their system. The second is that people will have BOTH Nvidia and ATI cards and Physx only works on Nvidia cards. The third point is that if you have only one card it will need to be a higher end card(much more expensive than what most people want to pay) to run both graphics and physics based stuff on the same GPU. Not great in these more austere times for games companies. The fourth point is that most people probably don't even have a Physx capable card to boot. The same goes for any similar ATI effort.

In the end it just causes more confusion among the majority of gamers when their shiny new game does not run as advertised just because it needs some specific feature hard coded to run on a select few graphics cards from a particular company. Maybe more games need to be like Half Life 2 and Far cry 2 which seem to run decently on a range of hardware and still look great instead of "exclusionary" tactics which only end up driving people to blasted consoles. The sad thing is that I am seeing more and more people who I know who used to be PC gamers now doing this [/End Rant].

Bit like directX 10 then.

I agree as Farcry 2 seems to be the first game to truly take advantage of it! The worst thing is that DX10 has been out for nearly two years!!

mm what about age of conan?

Couldn't similar have been said when direct3d / opengl games started coming out. I had a matrox millenium and a k6 200 cpu which played most games fine, then along came the big 3d games which looked so much better using dedicated hardware that I bought my voodoo (don't forget, at that time you either used voodoo or powerVR, the 2 were competing and titles supported one or the other). The industry has kept moving since.
Now, I don't feel what I've seen is as big a jump as it was then, but the demo reel for mirrors edge is at least tempting, it just needs more titles to scale well, from low end graphics, through mid/high end cards and then to dedicated physics as well.
What would probably be best would be a card that featured a second, lower powered ppu (or gpgpu) on the same card. Surely it can't be that hard to do. Then as long as the drivers worked it'd be a no brainer. More games would then support it andeventually it'd be a standard addition.

ati/nvidia, recruit llololloy asap.

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Originally Posted by llololloy

Couldn't similar have been said when direct3d / opengl games started coming out. I had a matrox millenium and a k6 200 cpu which played most games fine, then along came the big 3d games which looked so much better using dedicated hardware that I bought my voodoo (don't forget, at that time you either used voodoo or powerVR, the 2 were competing and titles supported one or the other). The industry has kept moving since.
Now, I don't feel what I've seen is as big a jump as it was then, but the demo reel for mirrors edge is at least tempting, it just needs more titles to scale well, from low end graphics, through mid/high end cards and then to dedicated physics as well.
What would probably be best would be a card that featured a second, lower powered ppu (or gpgpu) on the same card. Surely it can't be that hard to do. Then as long as the drivers worked it'd be a no brainer. More games would then support it andeventually it'd be a standard addition.

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Graphics card based physics will only be a standard when Nvidia,ATI and Intel support the same physics protocol. It also will have to be compatible with one graphics card and also give acceptable framerates with budget cards. Like you said there would need to be additional physics capability on the same card. If graphics cards between the £60 to £125 pricepoint cannot do decent graphics AND physics in a game together then there is no point. Most people will not spend more and they make up most of the game buying public. The vast majority of people are not going to buy two graphics cards for a game!!