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Article on hobbled CPU PhysX

If somebody wanted to take on the task of building a CPU PhysX dll they could get a program that can read the functions inside the current dll to give them a good starting point.

Of course you could also look at the SDK to see what the calls are, what is being done, what is expected to be returned, etc.

I'm not sure what Nvidia would have to say about it if somebody made a homebrew CPU PhysX release.
 
Well, according to the release notes for the current PhysX 2.8.4 SDK beta, it looks like they are doing optimizations for CPU PhysX as well as adding support for SSE2.

Time to do some testing :)
 
cyclone3d said:
I'm not sure what Nvidia would have to say about it if somebody made a homebrew CPU PhysX release.
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A similar situation has already happened.

Someone made a physx wrapper for ATI cards. He was within a week of releasing it and then Nvidia bought his silence. Instead of releasing the wrapper, he gushed about how wonderful Nvidia was and how they had invited him into their developer program.

The wrapper was never released and he never spoke of it again.
 
fattypants said:
A similar situation has already happened.

Someone made a physx wrapper for ATI cards. He was within a week of releasing it and then Nvidia bought his silence. Instead of releasing the wrapper, he gushed about how wonderful Nvidia was and how they had invited him into their developer program.

The wrapper was never released and he never spoke of it again.
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I wasn't talking about a wrapper though... although that would be a very interesting thing to try out.

PhysX can already run on a CPU... so they might not care. That being said, it might be somewhat of a moot point according to the 2.8.4 beta SDK release notes.
 
I thought that CPU PhysX being gimped to make GPU PhysX look better was old news.
PhysX on GPU looks great.
PhysX on CPU either sucks or performs poorly compared to pretty much any other CPU side solution.

I don't think Nv really cares at this point. It was a marketing tool for CUDA and their cards and did not ever seem to be much else. I don't expect to see much more than minor CPU improvements out PhysX until Nv renames it and starts charging for it.
That last bit is merely a suspicion I have based on PhysX not giving adequate value to Nv shareholders as a marketing tool that they thought it would/should. Devs of non AAA titles use it because it is free, and then still mostly only CPU side. When the AAA title makers use it, Nv seems to have to code GPU side in for them, or the devs uses something else.
 
Eh..... It's really debatable as to why CPUs suck so much.

When you compare Physx to say, Havok, it's usually ~10k particles to 100. Not exactly a fair comparison.

No doubt Nvidia doesn't optimize it, but a GPU is just better at physics, period. They are designed for massively parallel systems, physics is one, AI is another.
 
Zurginator said:
Eh..... It's really debatable as to why CPUs suck so much.

When you compare Physx to say, Havok, it's usually ~10k particles to 100. Not exactly a fair comparison.

No doubt Nvidia doesn't optimize it, but a GPU is just better at physics, period. They are designed for massively parallel systems, physics is one, AI is another.
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You are right, it is definitely not apples to apples. But, Havok and the others still manage to look good without crippling CPU loads, or requiring the GPU.

PhysX's purpose is to help Nv sell more GPU's. It is no real surprise that Nv is far more concerned with how PhysX runs on the GPU's they make, instead of the CPU's Intel and AMD make.
 
I couldn't justify buying another video card for physx the reward just wasn't worth the cost. I don't know how it is now maybe it's alot better IDK
 
jeremyshaw said:
I remember reading this a wee bit back...


I don't think nVidia broke it on purpose, they merely chose to never update the ancient CPU Physx code - something that wouldn't (seemingly) benefit them.
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refusing to simply recompile that part whey they have to recompile all the other updates could be viewed as deliberately breaking it. IE they had to actually try to do this.
 
Don't forget that PhysX can work with non-Nvidia cards in the system, Nvidia accidentally released a driver once (that was quickly taken off the site) that didn't have the bit of code that detects non-Nvidia cards in the system.

PhysX is nothing but Nvidia crippling your computer's potential and trying to market it to you as a selling point. It's pure garbage and one prime reason not to support Nvidia.

Nvidia, if PhysX is really "how it's meant to be played" then don't make us run Pentium 2 era code on computers a decade more advanced just to help your GPU look a little better. Nvidia is pulling an old snakeskin oil salesman trick showing you how much worse your life is without his quack medicine when in reality the quack medicine itself is simply the antidote to something he has already poisoned you with.
 
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PhysX only really shined in Batman AA, which surprisingly became an AAA title.

Hopefully Arkham City delivers as expected, this way there might be some more use for PhysX in the near future.

Mafia 2 PhysX wasn't that impressive imo
 
BC2 has incredibly fun physics and fully destructible environements. And it uses the Frostbite engine.
http://www.gamephys.com/2010/01/30/the-physics-and-destruction-of-battlefield-bad-company-2/

PHysX is ok but it can definitely be improved. It needs to evolve from the primitive 87x code for one thing. Once it moves to SSE2 like most modern code it shouldn't hog as much resources from the gpu, the Nvidia GPUs that we spent hundreds for. If the new SDK is true and PHysX will be usin SSE2 code, then I'm going to wait to see what that brings. I think the 480 has plenty of muscle where it shouldn't be crippled by running physx and rendering at the same time. Right now, that's not the case and the code is the culprit, not the hardware.
 
vjcsmoke said:
BC2 has incredibly fun physics and fully destructible environements. And it uses the Frostbite engine.
http://www.gamephys.com/2010/01/30/the-physics-and-destruction-of-battlefield-bad-company-2/

PHysX is ok but it can definitely be improved. It needs to evolve from the primitive 87x code for one thing. Once it moves to SSE2 like most modern code it shouldn't hog as much resources from the gpu, the Nvidia GPUs that we spent hundreds for. If the new SDK is true and PHysX will be usin SSE2 code, then I'm going to wait to see what that brings. I think the 480 has plenty of muscle where it shouldn't be crippled by running physx and rendering at the same time. Right now, that's not the case and the code is the culprit, not the hardware.
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iirc, doesn't the frostbite engine only use precalculated destructables? i.e, only a few ways an "object" can be destroyed? I remember some PhysX troll bashing frostbite for this exact reason.
 
eh, there really needs to be a common opensource standard that everyone picks up. wasnt something like that supposed to be in DX11?
 
In theory, a physics engine could be made to run using DirectCompute(introduced in DX11, but back-ported to DX10/10.1), which is a standardized API. The engine itself would have to be made by a third-party.
 
vjcsmoke said:
Microsoft owns the right to the Havok physics engine. But I don't really seeing it used much in anything. Oh i see, Havok was used in Halo. Nice.

http://ve3d.ign.com/articles/news/40584/Havok-Signs-Perpetual-Licensing-Deal-With-Microsoft
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Are you on drugs? You don't see havok used in anything? rofl Also Intel owns Havok.


jeremyshaw said:
iirc, doesn't the frostbite engine only use precalculated destructables? i.e, only a few ways an "object" can be destroyed? I remember some PhysX troll bashing frostbite for this exact reason.
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Yeah it does, the physics in the Frostbite engine is nothing spectacular. The destructible environments add more to game play than PhysX will in the next 10 years though. Lighting in the Frostbite engine is piss fucking poor too, I know it's off topic I just had to say it.
 
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