News - Tired of unrealistic hair? Then use AMD TressFX.

[crossy]

Wow not only are they making Tressfx open to everyone but also a version of the ps4's APU? Awesome business practice. I was pretty neutral before but I think I am now in favor of AMD.

Ditto here - I'm looking for a replacement for my GF460 and it looks like a budget 7970 will jump to the top of my "to get" list.

AMD seem to be on a bit of a roll at the moment - which pleases me greatly since they are giving competition to both Intel and NVidia, and hence keeping both of them "honest".

[ajones]

There must be more to a physics engine than pretty hair. I'm bald (and proud) so can't say that I'm jumping for joy.

I do prefer the AMD Direct Compute initiative, and seem to recall that when PhysX first came out that there was a consensus that a DirectX based Physics engine would be better than a proprietary solution (even more so when NV locked PhysX into NVidia hardware). Has this happened yet?

[valhar2000]

[...]there was a consensus that a DirectX based Physics engine would be better than a proprietary solution (even more so when NV locked PhysX into NVidia hardware).

Nvidia keeps a list of games that use PhysX on their PhysX website. If you look at the list, one of the things that should strike is how very few titles there are.

That is the problem with proprietary solutions. If you make a game and adopt one of them, you either loose the sales from all the people who don't have the hardware that's needed, or you have to do extra work to make a version of your game that does not use the proprietary technology. Hence, most studios don't bother.

Since TressFX (supposedly) uses DirectComputer, and DirectCompute is part of DirectX 11, any GPU that supports DirectX 11 should be able to run it. That means that any game developer that wants to use TressFX only has to worry about alienating people who don't own DirectX 11 ready cards; still bad, but a darn sight better than alienating an entire brand's buyers forever, which is what PhysX forces you to do.

[luigipogi1234]

nice improvement

[eltel]

why does TressFX sound so much like a hair conditioning advert coud'nt they have come up with a better name than that?

[AGTDenton]

I'm assuming this isn't just limited to hair?
Hopefully plant life can benefit from such a system, on Farcry 3 plant life still has a feeling of 2d about it.

[buffus]

AMD's being really cool about their developed technologies, maybe nVidia can share some physX goodyness with AMD? Pretty please?

[crossy]

AMD's being really cool about their developed technologies, maybe nVidia can share some physX goodyness with AMD? Pretty please?

Nice idea - make PhysX a licensed technology (on FRAND terms of course) then AMD and Intel could perhaps join in. However, (unless one of the many hardware guru's are going to say otherwise), didn't I remember NVidia claiming that they'd incorporated PhysX support into the firmware of the GF cards after the PhysX buyout?

Slightly worrying for me that CUDA (another NVidia only technology) also seems to be a lot more popular than competing tech, (OpenCL?). I'm speaking purely from an end user point of view - if I look at the GPU-acceleration options in video encoder software, usually CUDA is the only one on offer.

Actually decided to - over the weekend - bite the bullet and get that 7970 to replace my "old" GF460. So hopefully an XFX "Double D Black Edition"* should be winging it's way to me for tomorrow. £305 for an overclocked card with six games sounded like a good deal to me (courtesy of Aria). This'll be the first time I've defected to the "red team" for graphics in one of my PC's, so it promises to be an interesting experience.

(* Double D Black Edition? Just been remarked that this sounds like something you'd find in Soho - cue coffee spray from me)

[Biscuit]

Nice idea - make PhysX a licensed technology (on FRAND terms of course) then AMD and Intel could perhaps join in. However, (unless one of the many hardware guru's are going to say otherwise), didn't I remember NVidia claiming that they'd incorporated PhysX support into the firmware of the GF cards after the PhysX buyout?

They did incorporate it and if you have more than one installed, you can dedicate a Geforce card to be a PhysX processor. Problem is that it works just fine on a CPU (as proven by Borderlands 2 which can run on systems with AMD cards with a small .ini tweak that pushes it all to the CPU) and most games are bottlenecked by the GPU before the CPU... so running it on a dedicated GPU is largely a pointless addition of power and noise.

Slightly worrying for me that CUDA (another NVidia only technology) also seems to be a lot more popular than competing tech, (OpenCL?). I'm speaking purely from an end user point of view - I see CUDA support in video transcoders as the only option available if you want GPU-acceleration.

I think its starting to get better since GCN?

Actually decided to - over the weekend - bite the bullet and get that 7970 to replace my "old" GF460. So hopefully an XFX "Double D Black Edition" should be winging it's way to me for tomorrow. £305 for an overclocked card with six games sounded like a good deal to me. This'll be the first time I've defected to the "red team", so it promises to be an interesting experience.

XFX... Eeek!

[watercooled]

AFAIK there's nothing special about Nvidia cards that allows GPU PhysX to run on them, in fact I think I remember people had it running fine on AMD/ATI cards until Nvidia put more obstacles in the way (it won't run at all if there's an AMD card present in the system now).

As for CUDA vs OpenCL, it's likely more to do with heavy marketing than any major technical reasons. As for the video encoders, CUDA ones tend to be awful i.e. not that fast and very poor quality. Quicksync is better if you want speed and reasonable quality. Still, CUDA is a nice marketing bullet point to add to their feature list. We might actually see some implementations of AMD's VCE to compare, which promised a lot but so far doesn't seem to have any software support! There are a few apps claiming VCE support but are only really using an OpenCL codepath, not the VCE hardware. Saying that, Nvidia's 600 series also seem to include some fixed-function video encoding hardware, as demonstrated by Shield. Maybe there just isn't much interest in using it for transcoding? Or maybe devs would prefer the Intel marketing package for using only Quicksync?

[kalniel]

CUDA used to have an advantage over openCL in having some very nice compile/debug tools.

[watercooled]

Yeah I was going to mention better developer support but I'm not sure if that's still the case. Still, they were there first and I suppose there's a sort of Inertia preventing the dev base changing too quickly.

[Biscuit]

AFAIK there's nothing special about Nvidia cards that allows GPU PhysX to run on them, in fact I think I remember people had it running fine on AMD/ATI cards until Nvidia put more obstacles in the way (it won't run at all if there's an AMD card present in the system now).

Wasn't that in the early Win 7 days and didn't you have to have a both an AMD and Nvidia card installed?

[watercooled]

Sorry, I meant to say 'with' not 'on'.

And yeah, it was some sort of driver patch/mod but it no longer works AFAIK.

[crossy]

Maybe there just isn't much interest in using it for transcoding? Or maybe devs would prefer the Intel marketing package for using only Quicksync?

Problem might be that a lot of folks assume that if you're interested in transcoding then what you're actually doing is moving DVD's to MP4's to play on your iPhone, iPad, etc - I realise that this is a unfounded assumption. Hadn't heard of QuickSync - and unfortunately can't use it myself (AMD only gear). On the other hand my eldest kid's got an i5-powered laptop so I wonder if it's on that...

They did incorporate it and if you have more than one installed, you can dedicate a Geforce card to be a PhysX processor. Problem is that it works just fine on a CPU (as proven by Borderlands 2 which can run on systems with AMD cards with a small .ini tweak that pushes it all to the CPU) and most games are bottlenecked by the GPU before the CPU... so running it on a dedicated GPU is largely a pointless addition of power and noise.

Didn't know that - thanks! I had read something about slipping in a GF card into a system purely for PhysX, but then again remember reading something (EDIT: watercooled just said the same) about NVidia updating the drivers to fail if you used an AMD/ATI "main" graphics card and relegated your NVidia card in this way. Okay, so I'm going to have a GF460 card spare then.

XFX... Eeek!

Yes, I know But then again, I've also heard some good things about XFX's support recently (was reputedly abysmal, but now actually quite reasonable - again by report). Plus I had an SLI pair of 7800GT's that were XFX OC'd ones that were quiet, quick, stable and reliable. I'd have normally gone for Asus or Gigabyte, but figured I'd risk it. (And Aria also have a good rep in case it's DOA). Hope I'm not going to regret it...

[Skyah]

Did this really work for anyone ?