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All GeForce 8 Graphics Cards to Gain PhysX Support
J. Dzhugashvili writes "Nvidia completed its acquisition of Ageia yesterday, and it has revealed exactly what it plans to do with the company's PhysX physics processing engine. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang says Nvidia is working to add PhysX support to its GeForce 8 series graphics processors using its CUDA general-purpose GPU (GPGPU) application programming interface. PhysX support will be available to all GeForce 8 owners via a simple software download, allowing those users to accelerate games that use the PhysX API without the need for any extra hardware. (Older cards aren't CUDA-compatible and therefore won't gain PhysX support.) With Havok FX shelved, the move may finally popularize hardware-accelerated physics processing in games."
Because they don't get developers to plaster things like that "en-veeee-diar" voice over the start of games?
Having said that, I use Linux so my next card probably will be an nVidia because of the better drivers. Unless ATI get better in the one/two/three years until I buy a new card.
It'll be interesting to see what they can do to really exploit this PhysX and make it worth its while, though.
This gives much more sense to buying all those dual GPU cards out there. However, they do consume quite a bit of power and therefore contribute to global warming by taxing the power stations more.
:P
So Ageia's stocks go up, nVidia's down. I hope I didn't plant any ideas into the heads of the green peacemakers.
I knew buying a PhysX was a waste of time. Now they're effectivly useless - I already have an 8800.
...what will be calculating my 3D images, if the GPU is already working on the physics? It is not like there is so much spare capacity left over in modern games anyway...
I hope the NVIDIA acquisition and now this news will drive the adoption of the PhysX Engine. Right now, if you look at the list of titles, the PhysX Engine is not used by many games (namely, mostly Unreal3-Engine titles).
If the adoption picks up, maybe Havok (which is now Intel property) will not remain the only physics engine in town, but right now, this news will not affect a whole lot of games...
Better is very subjective. We have both nVidia and ATI based thinkpad laptops running Ubuntu at work. And what I've noticed is that the ATI ones can do a kernel update with out screwing up the gfx drivers and they can switch between single and dual monitors (necessary when going on and off dock) without restarting X. On the other hand the nVidia ones have a pretty lil graphical config tool, while the ATI ones use a somewhat arcane and unreliable command line program. Personally I wouldn't trade my ATI one for an nVidia one any day, I very much like being able to unplug from the dock and switch down to single screen without closing and restarting all my apps.
so now that my vid card is processing the 3d graphics and the physics (which is really only eye candy) how about we make it -the gpu- run the O/S tooo!!!! ooo ooo my next summer project! have linux run on just the video card! (openmosix is still around right :-D?) :-p
what?!?!?! it runs on everything else. right now i'm typeing this on my old 700mhz laptop running the latest debian :-p
bored? try this http://jadmadi.net/blog/2005/01/27/linux-wine-how-to-running-windows-viruses-with-wine/
Having said that, I use Linux so my next card probably will be an nVidia because of the better drivers. Unless ATI get better in the one/two/three years until I buy a new card.
AMD has open sourced their Radeon drivers. What more could you ask for than that?
> AMD has open sourced their Radeon drivers. What more could you ask for than that?
GPL Licence? better support for linux from AMD themselves?
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Physics covers a lot, from gravity, inertia, particles, collisions, IK and various other bits and pieces. Not everything lends itself to acceleration. So what will be accelerated by this?
Exactly. I support ATI now primarily for that fact. After using them I realized that they are just more capable all around cards. Who cares which one is minutely faster? In the end it doesn't matter what card I play my games on, so why should they be shoving ads for nVidia down my throat?
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
Graphics drivers that run Compiz-Fusion and let my play DirectX games through Wine without having to do a force redirect with a key combo? Graphics drivers on a 256MB X800 that rotate the cube as smoothly as the low-end nVidia in my machine at work? Graphics drivers that run video at full-screen with Compiz-Fusion running without all the tweaking and tinkering?
Yes, the open sourcing might be useful, but nVidia works more smoothly with DirectX, Compiz-Fusion and media played through anything other than VLC (where I can easily set the output mode, although it still seems a tad sluggish at times).
"nVidia - the way it is meant to be" (or whatever it is).
No, the way it is meant to be is a game that I play on my computer, not an advert for a specific card manufacturer!
How old are you? Serious question.
See my other post for what doesn't work quite right with my ATI card. I guess there might be a difference between desktop and laptop, but most of those things aren't an issue for me. Can't say a kernel update has ever screwed up the graphics drivers on my work machine with an nVidia card, but then I use the Livna repositories for Fedora to download the RPMs for the graphics along with the kernel update.
Whereas for me, ATI hasn't had usable XV support since 8.35.5 (or thereabouts), and the 3D rendering is buggy as hell... which kinda defeats the purpose of using a dedicated GPU. Go look at the known issues in the release notes - it reads like an alpha dev-snapshot. I regret fitting ATI to my laptop for the sake of a supposed performance advantage over the Nvidia option, and my next machines will absolutely be NVidia Quadro (Sun workstation, yes Nvidia even provides drivers for Solaris x86) or Intel integrated (ultraportable notebook).
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Who gives a shit how old anyone is? It's an interesting question.
Jag pratar lite svenska.
If existing cards can be upgraded thrugh a software patch, NVidia should have been able to do this all along. Are the PhysX people just much better at coding physics, or is there another reason this haven't already been added?
In other words, did NVidia just buy some clever code?
Really? I've abandoned the idea of buying an Ati long ago when I found out how crappy their OpenGL support is.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Isn't the real problem that the games that DO incorporate PhysX hardware support don't really showcase the technology in any carnal desire type manner. There's no equivalent of GLQuake, that drove adoption of the original 3D cards.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_learn_products.html CUDA can run on some pretty cheap cards now.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
I am certainly not a lawyer, but here's how I understand the situation:
GeForce 8 cards have had CUDA support from day one.
nVidia bought Ageia, and with it all they need involving the PhysX API.
This upcoming download to enable physics acceleration will be a PhysX-to-CUDA wrapper that is in no way locked down to the Geforce 8 architecture (which is the point of CUDA).
By my understanding of SarbOx (which admittedly is not great) this falls under the same category as programs being written for an Intel processor. It certainly adds value, but since the ability to program it was in the design from the beginning it shouldn't pose any accounting problems.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Have they? Where's the big news announcement?
The last big news I saw was not that they OSed the drivers, but that they had given partial card specs and promised more.
Please note that Matrox did the same thing in 1999 - They gave partial card specs (insufficient for implementing any 3D) and promised more, but never delivered. Lots of Linux users got suckered into buying paperweight G200s (including myself) back then. I will buy a card that performs as advertised NOW (whether or not it is with an open source driver or not), not a card that the manufacturer promises will eventually perform as advertised but can't at the moment.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
I had an ATI card once. The open source drivers (no mode switching) worked better than the binary ones (black screen). And the binary ones complained that, despite buying a card in a box plastered with "RADEON" and the ATI logo, it was not an ATI card, and therefore unsupported. Fuckers.
I've been a happy owner of NVidia cards ever since.
That is all that matters for me, increasing my folding score!
Its good to see PhysX support, I know it was worth keeping my limbs rather than selling a arm or leg to make Ghost Recon Advance Warfare 2 to work good.
I think it's very forward thinking of NVidia to have incorporated the ability to do this for nearly a year. I'd say its almost game changing.
As an OpenGL developer, I can say that I will never touch an ATI product when I have a choice.
Their driver support lags behind nVidia by years, and when they "support" a feature, it will often be in software with no warning that it is - so instead of failing with a useful error message, all you know is that *something* you did causes your system to render at 1 frame per minute and be completely unusable.
I have spent weeks bending over backwards and through hoops to get our ATI test card to agree with me, just because it is so darn unresponsive when anything goes wrong. Non power of two texture in one of your models because the modeller apparently ignored your instructions? No warning, no error - just a hung machine that will take 5 minutes to kill the process.
Give me nVidia any day.
One might think reluctance to adopt PhysX would be knowing that a large number of your customers don't use NVIDIA cards and therefore wouldn't be able to take advantage of the technology.
It's almost the same reason why game companies aren't making their games Vista only.
I have nothing compelling to say
The ATI/AMD guys responsible for releasing docs are also FOSS devs working on X.org. The next data dump will be tcore code, which is used to program 3D shaders on R500 and R600 GPUs, and will probably be relevant to the R400 engine, which is similar to the engine in certain R500 cards. This is not a bait and switch; ATI needs the market share too badly.
~ C.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html Steam hardware survey (which I think is a fair representation of gamers - the people who use this stuff most) gives nVidia over 50% market share. 8 series is a little over 11% of all graphics cards used. There's already a fairly sizable market - and one that is only going to get bigger.
Any physics done on a PhysX card is only eye candy.
The latency to get the results of the calculations back from the card is high enough that your frame rate would cut in half (or worse) if you waited for the results. So games use it for particle effects, and render the results a frame or two behind. It doesn't matter at all for pure eye candy stuff, but it's just not useful for anything affects gameplay.
"ATI needs the market share too badly."
So did Matrox...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I agree, hardware physics needs a killer app. I was playing around with the idea of adding PhysX support to Quake 2 and modifying some maps to have real liquids instead of the fake water it normally had, but after making some tests apps I realized how incredibly slow the physics are on a CPU. I'm not holding my breath, but I hope the GPU is capable of at least playable frame rates.
So I take it you've never played HL2 or TF2 or anything else using the HL2 engine?
I knew as soon as I posed that somebody was going to hit me with some statistics.
ATI isn't in the throes of death. One assumes that if Nvidia holds 50% of the market some other video card manufacturer probably holds that other 50%. My guess is it would be ATI. Who I'm guessing would make every effort to push back against Nvidia.
Nvidia still needs to convince more of the bigger studios like id and Valve to use their technology exclusively. Which probably won't happen. Because if they start building engines locked down to one specific card their licensing potential goes way down after that. You basically have to own a specific Nvvida card in order to play the game, as opposed to whatever card you happen to have in your system.
I have nothing compelling to say
Bull! I used to routinely play Quake3, as well as TuxRacer (full version) with a matrox g200 card in my Linux box. See this site for instance, the documentation may not have been the best, but it was enough.
I know they had problems getting an OpenGL driver out for Windows, I'm not sure they ever got it right, and a lot of people were pissed, but that's completely different.
Just to follow up, the g400 series was out in '99, and it had one of the best open-source 3d drivers for linux for quite awhile.
Thank you, nVidia and Ageia, for saving me from spending $150 on a Physx card! I was very close to buying one, but now I won't have to!
/* No Comment */
I agree - especially in the extensions realm, nVidia has MUCH better OpenGL support. In fact, the last ATI card I bought was well after fragment [pixel] shaders were approved by the ARB (an EXT in 1.3), but the card spec claiming both vertex and fragment shaders was misleading - the fragment shaders were ATI's (then long dead) proprietary fragment shader GL_ATI_fragment_shader.
They came out with OGL 2.0 and 2.1 cards well before ATI, as well (but ATI tends to outperform them when they finally do show).
Since I upgraded to an 8800GT from an old 7-series card, performance in Windows has rocketed but graphics in Linux have gotten slower, and the display is full of glitches too. They actually had a bug in the drivers where the fan ran at 100% constantly, making the computer sound like a leaf blower whenever I was booted into Linux, and it took them over a month to fix this.
Unless they get their act together soon, this shall be my last NVidia card.
Wasn't intended as flamebait. Adding PhysX capabilities to existing products could be seen as adding functionality that people would otherwise have paid for. I mentioned Apple simply because it's the only high-profile example of a company using this rationale for charging for an update. I meant nothing against Apple in general.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
This might sound silly, but exactly what does PhysX do? And what would I benefit from having PhysX support on my new card? I know a few games I might want to get that use PhysX (Unreal Tournament 3), would that make those games run faster?
If you have a single core CPU, I suspect this will speed up UT3. However, if you have a multi-core CPU, it could be different. One core runs the game, another the PhysX is software, and the video card has all free resources to rendering.
I have a feeling that benchmarks will reveal nVidia enabled PhysX will SLOW down UT3 framerates.
Life is not for the lazy.
it reads like an alpha dev-snapshot.
Not to mention it functions like one too. A few releases ago, the driver had broken the ability to display 1650x1050 and up until recently it couldn't suspend with any kernel using the SLUB allocator which debuted as the default in 2.6.23 but was in 2.6.22. What a joke.
Hmm. Must've been very late 1999 (Quake3 was released nearly a year after I ditched my G200 in favor of a Riva TNT, which was probably around Jan-Feb '99.) I bought the G200 in August '98 because Matrox was promising all sorts of support, and all I know is by the time I stopped checking to see if anything had happened (4-5 months after purchasing the TNT), nothing significant had yet been delivered and the only 3D available on the Gx00 series was based on the earlier generation Mystique cards (and was EXTREMELY limited - no texture mapping for example.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?