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Current state of PhysX? Is it well and truly dead?

I have this theory that ray tracing may eventually bring back PhysX type processing. Baked lighting, shadows, etc. take a lot of pre-calculation and storage and there's only so much of that you can stuff into a game. It's one of the reasons we don't have fully destructible game environments. Devs have to predict and bake all the possible lighting & shadow states or it won't look right. That's pretty much undoable if players can destroy anything in the game. If you're using real time ray tracing you don't have to pre-bake lighting and shadow maps for every possible spot a jet might fly over, drop a 2000lb bomb on, and leave an appropriately sized crater. Blow a big hole in something and if the baked light & shadow maps aren't ready for it things won't look right. Now if we're dropping 2000lb bombs wherever we want and blowing holes in buildings with tank guns or whacking trees in a fantasy RPG with an enchanted axe of splintering we might need some PhysX type stuff to deal with all the bits that go flying, and if the game is using RT it might not look goofy.
 
AgentNein said:
RIP PhysX. Hope nobody was looking foward to playing those Batman games or Mirror's Edge at 16K resolution in the future.
Click to expand...

My understanding from other threads where we have been discussing this (but I could be wrong, as I have not spent the time to actually thoroughly read up on this) is that PhysX is still alive and kicking on pre-50 series GPU's, and will stay as such until those GPU's support ends. (who knows when that is, but at least the 40 series will likely still be supported for some time)

You can probably just stick an old low end cheap used secondary GPU from eBay in a 4x chipset PCIe slot if you have one, and have that crunch the PhysX calculations for you.

The cheapest you could get that would work (for now) would probably be a $12 Quadro K620 on eBay.

The question is what you do once all older GPU's that support it are EOL:ed. Maybe by then the ZLUDA thing Drezkill is talking about above will be working.

Or, maybe there is a way to manually install an older driver for just the PhysX card while at the same time having the latest driver installed for the rendering GPU? (I've never messed around with this)
 
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