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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.
Maybe 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
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.
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
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?
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.
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
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!
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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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.
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.
"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
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.