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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."
Well, the amazing part of the whole deal here is that benchmarks show almost no decrease in framerate with PhysX turned on. So yeah, it's kind of a big deal.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
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.
Maybe the amount of physics that would overwhelm the CPU (which can also kill framerate, BTW) is hardly lifting a finger for the GPU. It's certainly not impossible; GPUs do blow away CPUs for some calculations, which is why we have GPUs in the first place.
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.