Is PhysX worth the extra?

[ed^chigliak]

No. I always wait for a bargain so if I do buy Nvidia I'll be buying PhysX at a discount. If ATI have a better deal then I'll go with their technology. Lower power and quieter cooling is more important to me then PhysX. If Fermi is big hot and noisy then I don't want one. I have never wanted or needed two cards and if performance takes a hit on a single card due to PhysX then I will probably just disable it anyway. 3D vision is even less appealing.

Triple monitor support is useful for more than just games although I won't be an early adopter and prefer to wait for thin bezel solutions preferably with LED back lighting and lower power consumption.

[Infinite]

All the games that use PhysX that I would buy, have already been bought for my PS3 :S

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_physxgames_home.html

The number of games is pretty pathetic.

[TooNice]

CUDA + PhysX is worth about £15 to me for a card that cost £150+ (weighted in favour of CUDA until more games with good PhysX implementations are released). That's largely ignoring the recent 'politics' surrounding it. If I was to let the politics of the cards influence me, then I should never have bought a single Creative (a company I consider far more evil than what nVidia is accused of doing now) card after they killed Aureal.

[Zak33]

No... I'd like to see all 4 of my quad cores maxed first please... which never happens in games

[Zak33]

If I was to let the politics of the cards influence me, then I should never had bought a single Creative (a company a consider far more evil than what nVidia is accused of doing now) card after they killed Aureal.

POST OF THE WEEK AND IT'S ONLY MONDAY....

RIP Aureal.

[DanceswithUnix]

No... I'd like to see all 4 of my quad cores maxed first please... which never happens in games

4 quad cores? I think it will be a while before a game can max out 16 cores




... I'll get me coat.

[DanceswithUnix]

POST OF THE WEEK AND IT'S ONLY MONDAY....

RIP Aureal.

And the Gravis Ultrasound.

Never liked my Aureal card much, but the GUS was lovely. Killed off, ISTR, by Microsoft adopting the tripe that was Soundblaster as the standard programming model.

Back to the original topic though, I don't have any games that demand Physix, I don't have a powerful enough card to support it.

I was considering keeping my 8800GT as a Physix card when I do my next upgrade, but I have an ATI chipset so that probably isn't allowed.

[circuitmonkey]

PhysX - No,

However good open_cl support, yes!

[Pob255]

PhysX is a great idea and concept, run ingame physics calculations for reactive particles on seperate multi stream processor.
the x86 processor just cannot handle those types of calculation efficiently, it's like trying to go round a go-kart track in a muscle car.
Ageis brought out an engine and a ppu, there were a couple of games which where heavily PhysX where you had to have a ppu, as trying to run them without it was bad even with a high speed quad core.
The Problem, not everyone has a ppu so most games just throw in a few extra pretties, the potential for PhysX was massive, but games developers didn't want to shutout 90% of there market by making PhysX dependent games.
In step nVidia to buy the rights, with the idea of running PhysX on the gpu via the new stream processes. (ok the base idea may not be original, but it was nvidia who bought up Ageis)
This has the potential to be massive, the problem getting in the way is the politics and money.
A good OpenPhysics system that can be run on any gpu is what is needed to take this to the next level, as it is there's way too much money involved with licensing and rights which is why we get thing like nvidia only wanting physX to run on nvidia hardware.

And all this is why the poll is sort of moot, PhysX is software now not hardware, if nvidia licensed it to ATi we could have it on ATi cards as well and games that used it for more than added pretty

nvidia really should consider doing is releaseing a seperate card.

[shaithis]

nvidia really should consider doing is releaseing a seperate card.

They had one in the form of the Aegia that they inherited......but they even disable that if they find a non-nVidia card in the system.....Which means they are not interested in selling PPUs, they are only interested in selling (the more expensive!) video cards.

If they wanted a separate PPU card, they would just be selling us all 8600/9600 cards to go alongside our main video cards.....but they are obviously too greedy to take that route and would rather leverage the technology to entice and lock buyers into nVidia parts instead.

[menthel]

The CUDA option, yes. The physx, no. I have no need for it and the games I tend to play just don't use or require it.

[Pob255]

They had one in the form of the Aegia that they inherited......but they even disable that if they find a non-nVidia card in the system.....Which means they are not interested in selling PPUs, they are only interested in selling (the more expensive!) video cards.

If they wanted a separate PPU card, they would just be selling us all 8600/9600 cards to go alongside our main video cards.....but they are obviously too greedy to take that route and would rather leverage the technology to entice and lock buyers into nVidia parts instead.

This is what I mean the money involved with licensing and rights is getting in the way.

The CUDA option, yes. The physx, no. I have no need for it and the games I tend to play just don't use or require it.

PhysX is just a proprietary realtime physics engine desgined to run off a highly parallel processor which means it is far more effective than a cpu at these form of calculations.
Just because a game doesn't have PhysX doesn't mean it's not using some form of realtime physics engine.
A good example here is Crysis which runs it's realtime physics engine off the cpu only and that is one of the major factors involved in why crysis is such a cpu hog and can run very badly, esp when you hit a major physics event (eg blowing up a shack)
Crysis should in theory run far better if the realtime physics engine had been offloaded to the gpu.
But again it's proprietary software (in the form of the game engine) and that can be worth far more money to a developer/publisher than the game it self.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I am not that interested in GPU based physics at all as I do not want to have more than one graphics card in my system. Why should I have to pay for another graphics card - it also restricts the type of gaming build you do too. When you run it off the same GPU it makes more sense but then it is taking up valuable GPU resources which should be used for better things like the graphics for example.

Crysis does not even take full advantage of quad cores!!

In this review a Core i5 750 is achieving similar frame-rates above 1680X1050 in Crysis as a cheaper Phenom II X2 555BE using an HD5850 1GB:

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/phenom...w-31794-8.html

[Random_guy]

Actually quite a large number of games use the physx api for their physics engine, but most don't use the gpu accelerated features such as cloth and particles (smoke etc), and this is probably because devs are worried that if they use it to provide extra features that ati users can't access, it'll harm their sales to ati card owners.

If ati ran gpu physics, even if it were propietory, I wonder if devs would just implement both, but with no ati solution, its not worth the risk for most.

I wanted physx for mirrors edge and Batman AA, and personally I think its worth paying a small amount extra for, but if ATI had gotten around to implementing their own solution then I'd probably have gone that way instead.

[dangel]

Problem is, physics on a big scale isn't zero cost - it's one thing doing all those calculations but at some point you've got to render the results and that means lower overall FPS. In batman a lot of the effects were incidental but when they added lots of floating bricks in the scarecrow parts (although it looked nice) there was a noticeable drop in framerate. There's two parts to that - the aforementioned need to render more stuff and the fact you're splitting your render device (the graphic card) between doing the physics and the drawing itself. The reality (I feel) is that basic physics which actually alters gameplay (rather than just provides floating boxes in the background) is something that's more suited to another device right now - i.e. the cpu - which has spare cycles to be used for such things. Obviously this is true - because people like Valve and Crytek aren't using PhysX and yet providing tangible in game physics in big titles.

Now of course if everyone could user physx and cheaply then devs could rely on it always being there and build their games around it, rather than tack it on as an extra feature when nVidia pay them to do so. But of course, nVidia are acting all dumb and stopping ATI users from using nVidia cards for physics, just because they don't want them buying ATI video cards (period). That's annoying, especially when ATI cards are far better for graphics right now (and for a while yet) and also helping to hold back PhysX adoption (stupid). That said, even if that weren't true, i'm not sure I want another video card sucking power/making heat in the case just for physics..

[mercyground]

No.

HardOCP proved that you get better performance in software than on cards. Even on Batman ATI cards did better than NV's when driver hacked.

No because Not an open standard.
No because of driver lockins/disablement cos ATI card in system. How very petty.