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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.
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
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?
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.
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
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.