E3: NVIDIA Releases New Version of PhysX

[Sam_Reynolds]

Earlier today at E3, NVIDIA launched a new version of their PhysX software development kit. This version of PhysX has been three years in the making, and supports nearly every platform imaginable: PC, Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION3, OSX, Linux and Android. NVIDIA says that their new PhysX engine is a complete rewrite which provides a significant performanc... [ Read full article ]

So does this mean it's cpu based now? And possibly work on AMD gpu's? Would be nice if Nvidia would come out of the dark ages and share :)

[SKYMTL]

It allows for IMPROVED performance on multi core CPUs while maintaining the ability to be used on NVIDIA GPUs. As far as I know, AMD GPU support is (thankfully) not included.

This is great news!

This new SDK is a good omen as far as Physics gaming goes. This is a good system and NVidia overhauled it a lot since they acquired it and now is no exception.

I also think it's good they keep it gpu based as it keeps the load on the card and not tax the cpu (which is not as good for floating points operations). Sure, it's unfortunate AMD doesn't have Physics, but nothing prevents them from building their own solution or buying the rights to use NVidia's Physics. :-)

[Eluder]

Physx is still limited in use though, not many games utilize it and I'm not a fan of them not sharing.
I think they should support the CPU heavily since games these days rarely tax anything on the CPU, might as well use these powerful CPU's for something in games.

[KylSp]

If they un-crippled the CPU performance then they would have no leg to stand on to push dedicated video cards to be used as physx cards. It's all just a big marketing scheme, real world use there are a tiny handful of titles and maybe two actually good games that have used it.

Then again it's the best thing since sliced bread to some of the people in the industry.

[SKYMTL]

I don't agree. Once more effects are added, a dedicated GPU will be a MUST. What this now allows is potentially different levels of PhysX: off, moderate (for a CPU) and high (for GPU).

[KylSp]

Added to what though? The adoption list for the PC market isn't exactly stellar, even with nVidia TWMTPB coffing out hundreds of thousands to developers in time or staff to push support. Batman (great game), Metro (decent FPS) are really the only two stand outs for this which had zero gameplay reprocussions, and that's through years of push. Mafia2 came and went without a whole lot of non-nVidia sponsored fanfare about it, it was stuck in GTA's shadow.

Look at this list: PhysX Games | NVIDIA Developer Zone
Almost all of those PC titles are something that no main stream gamer has cared about.

I understand that obviously nVidia pushers are going to be super excited about this, but that's about it. The artificial performance segregation still exists to push GPU sales, the adoption rate is poor and it's a vendor locked solution. Kind of the chicken and the egg, but it's a hard sell for market segment targets when you arbitrarily cut out a huge chunk of the market right away. This totally ignores the console arena obviously, but this is being brought up in a PC forum, so this is a PC centric opinion.

Hopefully for them it becomes a major force as Ageia had some very nice IP technology that seems largely wasted in terms of PC game deployment from the acquisition in 2008. The other business markets seem to be doing fine with that, but much the same reason we don't bring up quadro or tesla cards here, it's not a PC gaming area.

[SKYMTL]

The main things that were holding developers back from adopting PhysX on the PC were exactly the limitations addressed in this update: outdated CPU compiler, performance issues, etc. I believe Alice: Madness Returns will be the first title sporting PhysX 3.0 and it's due out next week.