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NVIDIA To Enable PhysX For Full Line of GPUs
MojoKid brings news from HotHardware that NVIDIA will be enabling PhysX for some of its newest graphics cards in an upcoming driver release. Support for the full GeForce 8/9 line will be added gradually. NVIDIA acquired PhysX creator AGEIA earlier this year.
And hopefully some Linux game/app will come out that can use it.
I read the internet for the articles.
Hopefully they'll include their Linux drivers.
If you're going to make a comment that useless you might as well just say "frist p0st!" and be honest about your intentionsMaybe we'll finally see some realistic physics with fantasy tentacle rape hentai games. Is it just me, or do the current tentacle rape game physics seem way off?
Hardware accelerated physical acceleration, gravity and particlestuff if I remember correctly, atleast old examples used to be throwing away items or exploding walls and such.
Basically exactly what it sounds like... its a real-time physics calcuating engine.
Used in games for things like shooting the limbs off of creatures, or even wind on trees, or water...
Likewise for other 3D applications, im not sure how extensive it is, or what its limitations are, but im looking forward to it, and more because calculating physic type things on most 3D software takes a lot of CPU power, so if the GPU can handle that, that takes a great load of the main CPU. (from what I would assume)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX
Realtime hardware accelerated physics. Used to be on a separate expensive board which few games supported but Nvidia are implementing it on CUDA so it can run on their graphic cards instead.
nvidia bought out he company so they own it and can put it on their cards, games that decide to add support for it it will benefit nvidia.
And hopefully when it does I'll get first post in the /. article about it.
I read TFA, but it didn't really give many details as to how this works, just some benchmarks that don't really reveal much.
Will this work on single cards or will it require an SLi system where one card does the PhysX and the other does the rendering?
Plus, how does handling PhysX affect framerates? Will a PhysX enabled game's performance actually drop because the GPU is spending so much time calculating it and not enough time rendering it, or are they essentially independent because they're separate steps in the game's pipeline?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
This was reported in February, shortly after Nvidia purchased PhysX. Of course, the GF9 series had not been released yet, so it was not mentioned in the news posting -- but future support sort of goes without saying. I'm fairly certain that it was reported on /. with a nearly identical headline in February as well.
-Turkey
Mmmmm.. hardware accelerated litter..
which is totally what she said
I called this when the PhysX cards first came out. I told my excited coworkers, "these cards are going to be irrelevant pretty soon, because it will all move to the GPU". They looked at me funny.
Music speeds up when you yawn, but does not change pitch.
and the mac osx drivers
I begin to wonder what's the use of having a multi-core CPU if GPU will be taking all the hard work?
What's next? "Graphic" cards with hardware accelerated AI support?
But going from a little physics demo to full blown kick ass 3d game with any meaningful results is a whole 'nother matter.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Really? I don't know any gamers that are excited about this. Name more than one game (without googling) that supports Physx?
I don't need to Google. Anything built on the Unreal 3 engine has PhysX support built in.
iduno, I'm inclined to believe his post was more useful than yours... or mine...
Modding Trolls +1 inciteful since 1999
So... Unreal 3? That's one...
Reading comprehension...anything built on the Unreal 3 engine.
Like one of these many licensees:
http://www.unrealtechnology.com/news.php
Native PhysX Support:
http://www.theinquirer.net/en/inquirer/news/2007/05/30/unreal-3-thinks-threading
Duke Nukem Forever.
Yeah, but last time he did that he got modded off topic http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=556184&cid=23446146
Unreal 3 is an engine that's used on LOTS of games - technically ALL of them have PhysX support, so no, not "just" Unreal 3, because there is no game called Unreal 3.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
So just Unreal Tournament 2007?
Except modern physics engines (see: Quake 1 for MS DOS) use threads for each individual moving physics object, and the Render Thread that manages control of the graphics card uses 1 thread itself (hard to split up that...), so with new Quad Core and 8 and 16 core systems you've got a much better physics processing engine running on your CPU.
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They might have some incentive to now that AMD is both working with Havok and releasing Linux drivers with the new ATI card.
horror vacui
It makes City of Heroes look all awesome, particularly if you use Gravity, Storm, Kinetics or Assault Rifle power sets.
Having bullet casings, leaves, newspapers and the like drop and swirl around in response to player actions is actually pretty nifty from an immersion standpoint, particularly for a game that's essentially set in something that resembles the real, modern world.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
"Having bullet casings, leaves, newspapers and the like drop and swirl around in response to player actions is actually pretty nifty from an immersion standpoint"
That's it. I'm done with immersion games. I'm going outside to stand in the rain. Back later.
--
BM0
That's not a useless comment at all unless I'm missing something. UT3 hasn't been able to put out the long-promised Linux driver because AGEIA is being so unwilling to release the license grapple hold they have over the PhysX engine. This is a legitimate concern. Unless their stance changes, Linux drivers will not be possible.
And hopefully the /. article won't be a dupe.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
There hasn't been for a while, that's why buying a quad-core CPU is largely useless for gamers and one of the best uses of a dual-core CPU is running a single-threaded application alongside Windows. Graphics cards are massively parallel multi-core systems and have much better real-world and theoretical performance in physics simulations. Physics and AI are all the GPU has left to conquer. I still see the CPU doing a lot of AI work, though, because those sort of algorithms (hey no recursion neat) are naturally far from the linear access sort of thing CUDA and related technologies are best at.
No, there are a few games which use the Unreal 3 engine:
Clicky
here, you can watch it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9GCZ1xRPMBI
So ATI has in their new Linux drivers Havok technology and it works under Linux for the new ATI cards?
What Linux application/game uses Havok?
And hopefully the comments in the article won't all be attempts at +5, Funny.
And hopefully the story wont be posted 4/1/2009.
-J
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
I did hear in an interview with an NV engineer recently that they are working to have a CUDA environment under a standard x86 cpu, just with reduced speed (since there's only 1-8 CPUs).
This stuff they designed specifically for their gforce shader unit (or vice verser), why should they do the work to key in AMD or anyone else to be able to do it, when AMD built their own GPU processing API do you think they offered to port it to NV cards?
The big question, how hard are NV going to push TWIMTBP (The Way Its Meant To Be Played) affiliated game producers to use it.
...
And now you know why the people at Intel have been pushing raytracing so hard recently: they know this, and are trying to avoid becoming irrelevant.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I'm not sure the bullet casings or newspapers did, and given that essentially every PC game that's not City of Heroes is either a D&D ripoff, a Doom clone or a WWII shooter, I didn't want there to be any confusion.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
The real big question, for people in the Real World who need to be able to support Nvidia and ATI GPUs, is when there's going to be a standard GPGPU and/or physics API that works on both.
Until then, all this shit's entirely useless.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The number of people in this world you speak of, is not as large (or indeed any substantial subset) of the end users of the devices in question.
As I said in another post, fire up all your games one at a time, and look through the start credits, TWIMTBP shows up a lot now on the "big" titles.
And I am not even going near their new CUDA processing array servers, which stand on their own merits with this tech.
...
It's not useless. There are a few graphics engines out there that are capable of scaling to different capabilities for different cards. For example: id Tech 4, Havok, Source engine, etc.
It does make development more difficult, though.
I love that this was modded insightful.
When we're talking about game worlds in which there could easily be 50 or 100 objects on the screen at once, it makes much more sense to have maybe one physics thread (separate from the render thread, and the AI thread) -- or maybe one per core. I very much doubt one real OS thread per object would work well at all.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Try http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_physxgames_home.html
Um, except if you you have exactly 1 physics thread you have to juggle complex scheduling considerations about who needs how much CPU, handle the prioritization against the render and AI threads, handle intermixing them, etc. You have to implement a task scheduler. ... which is exactly what Quake 1 did. Carmack wrote a userspace thread library, and spawned multiple threads. Since DOS didn't have threads this worked rather well.
An OS thread will give any thread a base priority, and then raise that priority every time it passes it over in the queue when it wants CPU time. It lowers the priority to the base when it runs. If a task sleeps, it gets passed over and left at lowest priority; if it wakes up and wants CPU, it climbs the priority tree. In this way, tasks which need a lot of CPU wind up getting run regularly-- as often as possible, actually-- and when multiple ones want CPU they're split up evenly.
If you make the render thread one thread, you have to implement this logic yourself. Further, the OS will see your thread as exactly one thread, and act accordingly. If you have 10000 physics objects and 15 AIs, keeping both threads CPU-hungry, then the OS will give 1/3 CPU to the physics engine; 1/3 CPU to the AI; and 1/3 CPU to the render thread. This means your physics engine starves, and your physics start getting slow and choppy well before you reach the physical limits of the hardware. The game breaks down.
You obviously don't understand either game programming or operating systems.
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People still actually play that piece of crap?
I went out and bought that quite a few years ago, and my friends all did too so they could play with me, and many of them won't speak to me anymore.
I didn't realize people actually liked it though.
You're nothing; like me.
AI support would need 'plot' :-)
I think we will have to wait a few generations until game developers see profit in expensive 'text'.
Eye candy is what sells. Why waste time and cash with AI's
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
All of them can support PhysX. They don't have to offer hardware acceleration, they don't even have to use PhysX for physics if they don't want to. This is critical, a lot of UE3 games are not supporting PhysX hardware acceleration. UT3 is still the only game.
And hopefully everyone won't just be stuck at +4 Funny and some negative karma mods that make the whole thing feel worthless.
Not exactly true, all of the Unreal Tournament Edition 3 engine games consistantly use all four cores in my Intel Q6600 with over a dozen threads spaced throughout my cores. The most notible examples would be UTE3, Bioshock and Mass Effect, 3 of the biggest games of 2007 and 2008. I can typically max out settings for UTE3 engine games.
On the other hand, performance demanding games like Crysis are total doucebags and peg just one core and sometimes using one more if it feels like it every now and then. Although it's not a very good comparison since there's so many different factors involved, I would gather to say that if crysis took an approach of optimizing better for duo and quad core cpus, their publisher would have far less complaints about performance from gamers.
When it comes to games, very few games take advantage of multi-core CPU:s, unfortunately. The only games I can recall benefiting from multi-core technology that I've played is Doom 3, Quake 4 and ETQW: Quake Wars. When it comes to general purpose computing, multi-core systems are often the way to go if you use multiple applications simulaneously. When I got my first multi-core system, I was completely amazed by how fast large program packages would compile. And this was only with two cores. I can't even begin to imagine what a delight it would be to compile stuff on a quad-core system.
The source engine, while "capable" of scaling to multiple cores, does a very poor job on current x86 chips. The games become very unstable with mat_queue_mode 2 on, and there are problems with jerky motion in any sort of latency.
It's a shame, too, because the engine works with multicore on various consoles, and it's a lot faster when it does work on PC.
Don't forget futuristic shooters, futuristic rtss and driving games.
Tux Pong!
l o l
Think of the CPU LOAD SAVINGS!
"WHAT I have to buy a second card, it's not free/can't run off the bios chip in the MB, WTF!!??"
The funny thing that now that the PhysX cards are Rago (It's in there) you still are going to have to buy a second video card to keep your frame rate up and increase the number of physX objects. Of course with this arrangement your GPU is less speciallized thant he PhysX hardware and can be used for all the CUDA applications.
I'm going to end up laughing if the physX ends up running better on the dedicated cards which by the way are below $100 now, verses a new $300-500 CUDA enabled video card. Typically dedicated hardware is faster than anything else.
Reguardless this will finally put to bed the whole "chicken or the egg" argument for widespread physics support in games. At least for those that don't have Intel graphics.
Maybe we can get a Windows game/app that uses it, too. So far we've had some tech demos with awful gameplay, but nothing worth buying.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
If they do, it'll cost $15 for the driver to enable this.
"What's next? "Graphic" cards with hardware accelerated AI support?"
Actually this isn't a bad idea, this is a good idea since pathfinding in games like Supreme commander is just a nightmare as you add more units, I've wondered about using the GPU for pathfinding acceleration.
Doom is a futuristic shooter. We had it back in this thing called the 90s ;) And an RTS is an RTS. Driving games on the PC have never been quite as prolific as on consoles either.. something I used to lament, but things are improving these days.
which is totally what she said
But that's not what he said. There was no substance to his response -- just one sentence that was probably posted quickly in order to be the first post without getting modded down as troll....
What's next? "Graphic" cards with hardware accelerated AI support?
If the problem can be represented as an array or matrix of data elements, and the core algorithm looks at two or more data elements together, then it can be solved using GPU techniques.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
City of Heroes/Villains
Since we're being anal / technical, Unreal Tournament 2007 is also regarded as Unreal Tournament 3. So far, the only game that I see that's out and supporting Physx is Unreal Tournament 2007. So, I'm not sure if you're Nvidia shills or out of touch fanboys, but "LOTS of games" is a serious overstatement.
Except that general purpose CPUs aren't really particularly great for raytracing. GPUs are simply special-purpose processors designed with raster graphics in mind. The newest fad is, of course, using all that special-purpose horsepower in more imaginative ways, but it's still a raster graphics processor at heart.
Why is it that they're raster graphic special purpose processors? Because raster dominates the playfield. What's the logical conclusion there? As soon as raytraced graphics engines start becoming popular enough to write a standard library for them, a la OpenGL or Direct3D, nVidia and ATI will be marketing special-purpose raytracing processors, and intel will either radically shift their core market (general purpose CPUs), or be in the same position as it is today relative to games. The raytracing push has nothing to do with intel wanting to keep its present product line relevant.
Your point is moot, as "Unreal 3" and "Unreal tournament 3" are two completely different things. One's an engine, one is a game based on that engine.
But sure, if you want a list of games, how about Mass Effect, Huxley, Gears of War and Roboblitz? Those are just the unreal engine games off the top of my head that I know have hardware PhysX support, there's plenty of other titles out there that use it as well, such as both GRAW games as well as a few other Tom Clancy games (one of which being Vegas - another unreal engine 3 game), Age of Empires 3 and plenty others.
But it's a chicken-egg thing, currently Havok seems to be the de facto standard of game physics for a whole number of reasons - but if PhysX on Nvidia proves to be more efficent, then more developers will start using it, especially since Unreal Engine 3 supports it directly.
Like it or lump it, PhysX has a decent amount of support and with nvidia supporting it directly on their GPU's, that support is only going to get better.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
NVIDIA To Enable PhysX For Full Line of GPUs
No, actually they are adding it to new editions of their cards. Not current cards already in machines. It is not a driver update.
a WWII shooter
You mean a Wolfenstein Clone?
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
I'm still patiently waiting for an Audio "processor" that uses these capabilities. Let's say, a GPGPU OpenAL Driver that outputs to your motherboard DAC, or that uses SPDIF with an GPGPU-enabled Dolby Digital Encoder.
And hopefully... Oh Hope my ass.
At first I thought you were playing coy, but now I just think you are retarded. UE3 is the engine. PhysX support is native to the engine. Any game developed around that engine, will inherently support PhysX.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Unreal_Engine_games
Unreal Engine 3
* 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand â" (2008) Swordfish Studios
* A4 (sequel to A3) - (2009) AniPark
* Aliens: Colonial Marines â" (Late 2008) Gearbox Software
* Alpha Protocol - (Spring 2009) Obsidian Entertainment
* America's Army 3.0 â" (2008) US Army
* American Mcgee's Grimm - (2008) Spicy Horse
* APB â" (2008) Realtime Worlds
* Army of Two â" (2008) Electronic Arts
* Alliance of Valiant Arms - (2007) Pmang
* Black College Football: BCFX: The Xperience - (2007) Nerjyzed Entertainment
* Black Powder Red Earth - (TBA) Echelon Software
* Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway â" (2008) Gearbox Software[23]
* BioShock - (2007) 2K Boston/2K Australia
* BlackSite: Area 51 â" (2007) Midway Austin
* Blitz - (2008) CJIG
* Borderlands - (TBA) Gearbox Software
* Crimecraft - (2008) Vogster Entertainment
* Damnation - (TBA) Blue Omega / Point of View
* DC Comics MMO â" (TBA) Sony Online Entertainment
* Earth No More â" (2009) Recoil Games / 3D Realms
* Empire - (TBA) Chair Entertainment
* Empire: Alpha Complex - (TBA) Chair Entertainment
* Ender's Game â" (TBA) Chair Entertainment
* Elveon â" (TBA) 10tacle Studios[24]
* End - (TBA) Faramix Enterprises[25]
* Fatal Inertia â" (2007) Koei[26]
* Free Realm - (TBA) Sony Online Entertainment
* Frontlines: Fuel of War â" (2008) Kaos Studios
* Fury â" (2007) Auran[27]
* Gears of War â" (2006) Epic Games
* Gears of War 2 â" (2008) Epic Games
* Global Agenda â" (TBA) Hi-Rez Studios[28]
* Hail to the Chimp â" (2008) Wideload Games [29]
* Highlander: The Game â" (TBA 2008) TBA
* Hei$t - (2007) inXile Entertainment
* Hour of Victory â" (2007) Midway Games
* Huxley â" (2008) Webzen Games[30]
* Lost Odyssey â" (2007) Mistwalker[31]
* Mass Effect â" (2007) BioWare[32]
* Magna Carta 2 - (TBA) Softmax
* Medal of Honor: Airborne â" (2007) Electronic Arts[33]
* MirrorÂs Edge (TBA) DICE
* Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia â" (2007) Artificial Studios[34]
* Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe - (2008) Midway
* Mortal Online - (2009) Star Vault
* Parabellum - (2008) Acony
* Project M - (TBA) NC Soft
*
Quad core: 1 core to the AI, one core to the physics, and 1 core to the render thread. No starvation?
Seems to me that with the progress of multicore CPU this is going to become irrelevant fast.
I would be embarrassed to post as myself too there urbanriot. It's native to the engine. What don't you understand about that? Do you know how game engines work?
You do know games use physics right? So in your mind it makes perfect sense to rewrite/license additional/not use the physics code that is native to the engine? Man, you truly are dense.
Maybe in your mind it makes sense to pay the outrageous licensing fees for the Unreal 3 engine, and then pay additional licensing fees for the Havok physics engine.
Do you know anything about computers/software/etc. or do you just post on slashdot to make yourself look cool with your nerd friends?
That's not me, jackass. I had no problem going on my current track, but it seems that someone else hijacked it. Fortunately, they made a similar point to what I was leading to. Since it's upsetting you so much, I'll leave it where it is.
And HOPEFULLY somebody will say something on topic within the first hundred posts.
This comment is my opinion and does not represent an official position of Donald Trump or others I do not work for
1 core to AI, 1 to physics, 1 to render, 1 idle. Or 13 idle, since Intel believes 16 cores is the "Sweet Spot" and will hit the desktop in a few years.
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Um, except if you you have exactly 1 physics thread you have to juggle complex scheduling considerations about who needs how much CPU, handle the prioritization against the render and AI threads, handle intermixing them, etc.
Which people do.
Or simpler: Give the render thread priority, and set it to vsync. Anything above 60 fps is a waste.
If you have 10000 physics objects and 15 AIs, keeping both threads CPU-hungry, then the OS will give 1/3 CPU to the physics engine; 1/3 CPU to the AI; and 1/3 CPU to the render thread.
Assuming the render thread needs that 1/3rd.
Keep in mind that ideally -- that is, if you're not lagging -- none of these are pegging the CPU, and you're just making whatever calculations you make every tick.
You obviously don't understand either game programming or operating systems.
Well, let's see -- most games I know of won't take advantage of more than one CPU. In fact, when Quake3 was ported to dual-core, it took a 30% performance hit -- and keep in mind, that's Carmack doing it.
And this is hardly the first place this argument has been made -- green threads are inherently more efficient than OS threads. Take Erlang -- it runs as many OS threads as you have cores, and distributes green threads among OS threads.
So I don't actually have to understand these. I just have to refer you to the people who do -- and obviously have a fair bit of experience making it work. Do you?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well, let's see -- most games I know of won't take advantage of more than one CPU. In fact, when Quake3 was ported to dual-core, it took a 30% performance hit -- and keep in mind, that's Carmack doing it.
Really? Quake 3 was already threaded when released; I looked through the code myself. On Windows, however, the Windows scheduler pegs all threads in one program to the CPU the program's on unless you manually manage that part of the scheduler (you have to give threads CPU affinity or they have affinity to CPU 0). I had it on Linux (which, if threads have no CPU affinity, will distribute them to the next available CPU when scheduling), it pushes both cores just fine.
And this is hardly the first place this argument has been made -- green threads are inherently more efficient than OS threads.
Ah, the green threads argument. Green threads was made when threading didn't work; back in the 2.2 days, Linux had a horrible thread scheduler and making more than 50 or so OS threads caused the computer to cry. Making a thousand made it drag its ass, and 10000 wasn't possible by a long shot. Things got better in 2.4; and then someone implemented NPTL on a different threading model, and tested with hundreds of thousands of threads spawning and exiting, doing little trivial tasks, sleeping, etc, and .... it ran. The kernel created 100,000 threads in 2 seconds; this took 15 minutes before!
We have 1:1 threading where each schedulable entity is an OS thread. With green threads, you have M:N threading where one OS thread might represent several real threads. In the latter case, you can get away with switching between threads in a given thread group without a context switch; Linux takes that (minor) hit, but is smart enough to schedule effectively and NOT do a cache/TLB flush when going from one thread to another in the same process (which is the big problem with thread-to-thread context switches). Unfortunately, you can also have priority inversion (low priority thread causing the blocking of a high priority thread), synchronization issues, and scheduling problems if you don't coordinate explicitly between the kernel and the thread library to control scheduling at the OS level (which, of course, gives you an abusable system API to raise your own priority). Such coordination is expensive and reduces performance.
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