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Game Devs Only Use PhysX For the Money, Says AMD
arcticstoat writes "AMD has just aimed a shot at Nvidia's PhysX technology, saying that most game developers only implement GPU-accelerated PhysX for the money. AMD's Richard Huddy explained that 'Nvidia creates a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.' However, he adds that 'the problem with that is obviously that the game developer doesn't actually want it. They're not doing it because they want it; they're doing it because they're paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn't because the game developer wants it in there.' AMD is pushing open standards such as OpenCL and DirectCompute as alternatives to PhysX, as these APIs can run on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. AMD also announced today that it will be giving away free versions of Pixelux's DMM2 physics engine, which now includes Bullet Physics, to some game developers."
I wouldn't be surprised if most game devs wouldn't implement PhysX if not for a subsidy. Only half the market is going to be able to take advantage of it after all. It may not be that they don't want it, just that it's not an economical use of their time otherwise.
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It's a difference in scale over Havok. I haven't had much time to play video games lately, but I saw a particularly nifty shot from Arkham Asylum. Shoot a bookshelf without PhysX and it falls over. Shoot it with PhysX and suddenly every individual page from every book flies through the air, each tracing its own path down from the sky.
So, you can do physics in Havok. But not on that scale.
I'd suspect that it's not being used for anything other than "ground clutter" is because you can't design your game around PhysX - not everyone has an NVIDIA card. So, PhysX has to be optional and can't change gameplay - which pretty much relegates it to ground clutter.
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Nvidia is very anti-competitive and has been for a very long time.
The recent "making physx stop working when AMD gfx card is present" is just one of the more public outings of their unethical behavior.
I wish someone would expose all of their shenanigans and anti-competitive practices so people can realize how badly these things affect the industry and consumers (ugh, hate that word).
The most recent thing I read about their practices is from the upcoming PC game, Just Cause 2. There's a trailer showing off Nvidia-only effects ...(something which is dead standard DirectX code) and artificially blocking out AMD/others from getting the benefits. The Batman Arkham Asylam scandal was one more people may recall. They claim (and their users/shills) that TWIMTBP is just "marketing"... more like bribery and blocking out the competition. They've been caught on many occasions but the public rarely sees anything negative about them.
Nvidia is the Intel/Microsoft of the video card industry but unlike them, isn't quite as dominant (thankfully for us) but they still do a hell of a lot of damage. (The Jupiter of the computer industry... too small to become a sun but still an 800 quadrillion ton gorilla).
I've stopped buying Nvidia cards since the Geforce 2. At that time for performance reasons but since then I vote with my wallet and let others know to support fair and legal competition.
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A friend told me about his experience with Utopia. It implemented GPU-accelerated physics in one of recent patches. But try hard as you wish, he failed to notice any difference for weeks of gameplay. Until he entered the central city. With flags by the entrance fluttering smoothly in the wind, instead of the old static animation.
Yep, that's it. Many megabytes of a patch, a game of hundreds of miles of terrain, hundreds of locations, battles, vehicles, all that stuff... and physics acceleration is used to flutter flags by the entrance.
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There are about 25 million PCs sold per month. I guess ATI is happy to have sold 8% of that monthly amount over the several months their 5xxx have been available, that's 3-4% of PC sales. Congrats to them, but still, fairly marginal.
Discrete cards have always been better than IGPs. I don't really get your point. Only recently (definitely way after the pentium 1) have IGPs become good enough to display all video files, or handle Aero.
PhysX is about making physics computations, not directly putting pixels on screen, so it's a kind of specialized GPGPU.
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Using a game like Arkham Asylum as a comparison between physx and havok is silly. You've got one physics path that's been specially developed to showcase the strengths of a particular brand of hardware, while the other is left as a compatibility fallback for everything else. That's not an apples to apples comparison. With that same reasoning one could say that ATI has worse anti aliasing than nvidia, simply because the game shipped without support for it for ATI.
Unfortunately from the physics simulations I've been working with I'm pretty sure that what they've done there is simply removed physics activity from the non-accelerated version rather than adding it to the accelerated one. A sneaky way of making GPU-accelerated PhysX look better. I'd be shocked if those book effects wouldn't be just as easy at the same framerate on the CPU unless there are truly ridiculous numbers of books.
I have to disable PhysX in the nVidia control panel to get HL2 or any of the Source engine games to run properly! I had no idea what was causing these games to crash. After disabling PhysX they work right every time!
Apparently it doesn't do anything crucial or even noticable as my games run just fine with it turned off. And now I'm told the game devs don't even want to use it?
This "feature" has caused me nothing but grief!