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."

Comments

Re:Maybe

[blahplusplus]

"Flying boxes and wood splinters do not make a better game."

But dead guys laying 180 perpendicular off a cliff makes them awesome? Does no one here remember the good old days of early FPS where if you died on the edge of a ledge your body would lay flat over the edge? Does no one remember the time when you hit dead bodies with shots and they didn't move or flail around? What about mass effect 1 the anti-gravity at the end with the geth/dead bodies floating and flailing around, not cool at all?

All that is physics and yes the do make a better game WHEN they are applied to things that need them and not over-used, especially not using physics as a gimmick.

clutching at straws

[obarthelemy]

GPU makers are in a bind:
- IGP are now enough for 90% of users: office work (even w/ Aero), video, light gaming, dual-screen... all work fine with IGPs
- the remaining 10% (gamers, graphic artists) are dwindling for lack or outstanding games: game publishers are turned off by rampant piracy, mainly online games bring in big money nowadays
- GPGPU is useless except in scientific computing: we already have more x86 cores than the devs know how to use, let alone use a different computing paradigm
- devs have to target the lowest common denominator, which means no GPGPU for games

I'm actually think of moving my home PC to one of the upcoming ARM-based smarttops. They look good enough for torrenting + video watching + web browsing, consume 10 watts instead of 150...

Re:clutching at straws

[Ironhandx]

Tell that to AMD who have sold 2 million directx11 GPUs since release. (http://www.dailytech.com/ATI+Sells+Over+2+Million+DirectX+11+GPUs+Celebrates+With+Radeon+Cake/article17349.htm)

IGP are sufficient for 90% of users... but that hasn't changed since back in the Pentium 1 days. Many PCs were equipped with IGP or something that amounted to the same thing but in card form even then.

Also: GPGPU is NOT meant for gfx processing on the fly at all, so it has absolutely nothing to do with devs having to target the lowest common denominator. You even state that its useless except for scientific purposes in your own comment. The entire purpose of the GPGPU move is towards scientific purposes where vast quantities of repeated calcs have to be done. Something that GPUs excel at.

At least get SOME of your facts straight before spouting FUD.

Re:Maybe

[ASBands]

I've done some work with both PhysX and the things that AMD is pushing for. I try to keep with the Physics Abstraction Layer, which lets me plug in whatever physics engine as the backend, which gives a pretty damn good apples-to-apples performance metric. Personally, my ultimate choice of physics engine is the one which exhibits the best performance. My experience may differ from others, but I generally get the best performance from PhysX on with an nVidia GPU and BulletPhysics with an AMD GPU. Sometimes, the software version of PhysX outstrips the competition, but I have never seen anything beat PhysX in performance with GPU acceleration turned on. And with PAL, it is easy to check if there is GPU support on the machine and swap in the physics engine with the best performance (PAL is awesome).

Here's the thing: GPU-accelerated physics are just plain faster. Why? Because collision detection is a highly parallelizable problem. Guess what hardware we have that can help? The GPU. Another great part of using the GPU is that it frees the CPU to do more random crap (like AI or parsing the horribly slow scripting language).

AMD is working on both BulletPhysics and Havok so they can do GPU acceleration. But I have a feeling that PhysX performance will remain faster for a while: PhysX was designed to natively run on the GPU (technically, a GPU-like device), while these other libraries are not. Furthermore, nVidia has quite a head start in performance tuning, optimization and simple experience. In five years, that shouldn't matter, but I'm just saying that it will take a while.

So here is my message to AMD: If you want people to use your stuff, make something that works and let me test it out in my applications. You've released a demo of Havok with GPU acceleration. PhysX has been and continues to work with GPU acceleration on nVidia GPUs and will frequently outperform the software implementation. I'm all for open alternatives, but in this case, the open alternatives aren't good enough.

Its all Hearsay

[KharmaWidow]

We don't have any proof that developers don't want PhysX. What we have is spokes person from company A saying that no one wants company B's technology. There are no scientifically obtained statistics only one guy's - a competitor - opinion.

Nor did the article state *why* it may be unwanted, or any specific why-nots for using PhysX

In my experience, PhysX has only been a hindrance!

[Roger Wilcox]

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!