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Modders Get Nvidia's PhysX To Run On ATI Cards
stress_life writes "Following controversial allegations that Nvidia is cheating in 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3 benchmarks, executives from Futuremark and Epic moved forward to clean any confusion.
However, the game was not over — enthusiasts from Israel ported PhysX middleware to run on ATI Radeon cards, achieving remarkable performance. Owners of ATI Radeon cards will be able to play PhysX games as well, such as Ghost Recon 2 and already mentioned Unreal Tournament 3."
This is hardly the big deal that Nvidia makes it out to be. Physics doesn't come for free on either card. It takes away substantial resources from the GPU's major function of rendering frames. Frankly I don't care how beautiful the physics are when the frame rate is 9.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Another vote for OpenPL. It only makes sense. You feed the coordinates from OpenGL to OpenPL. OpenPL returns a new velocity and position for the objects. Maybe toss in mesh deformation because of impact. All handled by the same tightly integrated processor for speed. I want it, and I want it yesterday :)
I suspect they'll license it to ATi.
The nVidia people are probably well aware that hogging PhysX to themselves is a stupid idea. Game makers aren't going to go out of their way to support it unless it can be reasonably expected that most gamers will be able to use it. It's a dead fish unless ATi can use it. That doesn't mean they'll just hand it over.
Not any more. You haven't been keeping up too well with tech news eh? Read a few reviews and look at some benchmarks of the 4850 and 4870 cards. If it were just one or two review sites showing such favorable numbers for the new ATI cards, they might be suspect. It's not one or two. It's all of them.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
And that performance is about 15-25% over my 8800GTS 320MB that I paid just over $200 for over a year ago.
The latest round of cards came WAY too soon.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Except that if I understand well, Havok == Intel since they purchased it... so ATI is between a rock and a hard place :)
$300? $400? $600? wtf!
It's been a while since I bought a video card. I totally splurged and got a $90 card! Worked for the stupid game I was trying to play I guess, but now that game is lame and I'm out $90! I wouldn't do it again--$90 is a silly amount to spend to replace existing functionality.
If I just wait a few years, any games I might still be interested in will be cheap and play on commodity hardware--and all I've lost is, well, nothing--actually gained a little extra time.
Obviously they can't incorporate this into their drivers, but one has to wonder how much they'll look the other way on this. Do they have any legal obligation to stop users from exploiting this (ie. modify their drivers to prevent such mods)? You can be sure they would go out of their way to stop something like that from happening in the other direction.
Relevant original phrase: All's fair in love and war.
Relevant original phrase with 21st century spin: All's fair in love and war so long as you don't knowingly infringe on existing copyrights or patents.
Yeah, nobody plays those old games like Starcraft or Counter-Strike anymore.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The problem with playing 10-year-old games online is that, for the most part, the only people still playing 10-year-old games online are really, REALLY good at them. New games will have a wide variety of players in terms of skill, while old games tend to have just the hardcore players. If you're waiting for prices to fall to play a game, you'll have missed out on the time it takes to learn how to play the game, both in general and against other players of a similar skill level, and you'll lose every online game you play.
This thread is so full of misinformation I don't know where to start.
Newtonian mechanics (no matter if you dress it up as Lagrangian or Hamiltonian mechanics) is basically just solving a second order ODE with constraints. Depending on how you set up the constraints and discretize the system, you end up solving a linear system of equations on each time step. Oh, and forget analytical solutions. There are like a handful of mechanical systems that you can solve analytically (called integrable), the rest can be shown to be impossible.
This is the approach used in real mechanics simulations. Guess what, it's too expensive for real-time computer games. That's when you get creative and start bending the rules in such a way that the physics is no longer strictly correct, but the methods work incrementally in such a way that from the state of the system at the previous time step you compute the state at the next time step, update the forces, and then maybe do some correction steps. No linear systems of equations to solve, much faster algorithms, but not strictly physical.
Then you have a whole world of elastic bodies and fluid simulations that I haven't even touched on. Again there the operating principle is: "Cut corners to make it fast but not too unrealistic".