[HN Gopher] Nvidia PhysX 5.0
___________________________________________________________________
Nvidia PhysX 5.0
Author : vectorrain
Score : 281 points
Date : 2022-11-08 14:38 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| philliphaydon wrote:
| I remember back in 2000s when Cellfactor demo came out on
| youtube.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIHI7y4ZG4
|
| Which needed that separate physx card at the time. Wonder what
| ever happened to it.
| uwuemu wrote:
| Not to be THAT guy, but Physx is basically reaching EOL. I'm sure
| a few mid sized studios who want to roll their own engine can
| still take advantage of the core, but with UE5 completely
| replacing Physx with Chaos and the "ballast" around the core
| (Blast/Flex...) being as useless as ever, I don't see the Physx
| adoption increasing.
| debug-desperado wrote:
| I seem to get unpredictable, if infrequent, hard crashing when
| playing the PhyX-enabled game Control unless I set the Nvidia
| control panel option to run the physics on the CPU. System event
| viewer pointed to a failed assertion in the Nvidia driver. I'm
| not 100% sure this has fixed the problem but I haven't seen a
| crash since the change.
|
| Since gfx benchmarking is stable and MemTest86 never found
| anything, the only other culprit would be power transients. I'm
| using a relatively modest 200 watt RTX 3060 ti so I hope it
| wouldn't be that.
|
| Just wanted to bring this up because I'm not the only one that
| has experienced this, it was a recommendation from a Steam
| discussion. And by hard system crash I mean full system reboot.
| [deleted]
| bni wrote:
| I always deselect this when I install the nVidia driver in
| Windows. I play none of the few games that are supposedly
| enhanced by it.
| anononaut wrote:
| I can only think of Planetside 2 from back a ways, but they
| removed it for the PS4 release. Cool tech, though, I enjoyed
| it.
| cypress66 wrote:
| You probably do, as unreal engine and unity both use physx.
| Just not the old system level libraries that are used for old
| games.
| bni wrote:
| ok, cool, didn't know that
| boarnoah wrote:
| Incidentally UE with 4.26+ (and more so 5, which is almost a
| complete cutover) switches from PhysX to their in-house
| solution of Chaos.
|
| A lot of it has to do with determinism over the network IIUC.
| cypress66 wrote:
| 4.26 and 4.27 still use physx by default, and their chaos
| version is basically unusable[1] (because of bugs and
| performance). There is a 4.27-chaos branch which is more
| updated (maybe the same version as Ue5 chaos?) but I don't
| know how usable it is.
|
| But yes the future for UE is chaos.
|
| [1] to be fair fortnite used it, but clearly they optimized
| and fixed only the subset of features that fortnite uses.
| arnau147 wrote:
| PhysX has been source available since 2015 (3 clause BSD since
| 2018) , so I wouldn't take this as an indicator in that regard.
| arketyp wrote:
| What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I
| remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day,
| seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude
| physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console
| titles, in an ajar way.
| debug-desperado wrote:
| Instruments of Destruction, still in Early Access:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1428100/Instruments_of_De...
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| iRacing
| 2III7 wrote:
| Beamng is really impressive physics wise. Lots of mods
| available and endless gameplay possibilities.
| wingerlang wrote:
| Maybe Teardown would be interesting for you.
| arketyp wrote:
| I followed that project and it's part of the reason I'm
| asking. If one guy can achieve that...
| singularity2001 wrote:
| Maybe not state of the art but I was very impressed by
| Assassin's creed origins.
| dogben wrote:
| The CPU on xbox one/ps4 is very weak. Developers have to
| sacrifice physics.
| aeyes wrote:
| The whole point of PhysX is to run it on the GPU.
| maccard wrote:
| That's not true at all. PhysX comes with a CPU solver by
| default, and using the GPU version comes with significant
| restrictions in customising the behaviour. Unreal Engine
| games (when they used to use PhysX) were all CPU based, for
| example.
| yummypaint wrote:
| Boneworks is a VR game where almost everything is physics
| based, including movements of all characters and your own
| avatar via a skeleton system. It has a different kind of feel
| to it and is quite innovative. It's an interesting approach to
| solving problems caused by having physics based objects
| interect with the "unstoppable force" of traditional player
| movement and the "immovable objects" of the environment.
| rouxz wrote:
| Boneworks has very impressive physics and interactons, it is
| even advertised as "Experimental Physics VR Adventure."
| yboris wrote:
| _Teardown_ - hands down one of the most innovative games in the
| last several years.
|
| It uses _voxels_ and the game premise is destroying the
| environment to create an escape route once you trigger the
| alarm (by stealing required objects).
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/
| airstrike wrote:
| Looking at a gameplay video on YT
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--c8rjcSDs), I didn't come
| away with the same impression as you described, or at least
| it doesn't really answer the parent's question. Sure, it is
| "fully destructible" but everything kinda breaks the same way
| because it's all voxels, and things like driving a seemingly
| indestructible truck through multiple walls doesn't feel
| particularly realistic.
|
| Someone else pointed to another game, _The Finals_ , which
| feels waaay more realistic:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGRoborkkw4
|
| I just hope it isn't another Battle Royale because that I
| find that genre incredibly underwhelming vs. team-and-round-
| based gameplay like CS:GO or offline campaigns
| taiiat wrote:
| Uhhh, Physics are indeed a major part of Teardown. the
| breaking of the Voxels themselves may not be individually
| impressive, but it's the nearly entirely destructible
| Environment with per Voxel calculated Materials that IS
| impressive. Voxels can be of a wide range of Materials,
| giving them, well, unique properties. that allows things to
| be strong, weak, and all sorts of other properties. Driving
| a Truck through a Building doesn't leave it unscathed,
| actually. Et Cetera.
| KronisLV wrote:
| They are impressive on a technical level, especially
| given how well everything runs. However, I think that the
| other was pointing out that the game feel/presentation
| itself was a bit lacking - not having much momentum to
| it, or just the destruction itself not feeling
| particularly eye catching (even if the gameplay is fun,
| due to you needing to act within a time limit).
|
| I'm inclined to somewhat agree, because you can still
| have situations where buildings can be hanging on due to
| a single voxel and will refuse to fall down, and when
| they do there's no sense of weight, instead they just
| kind of plop down. Very much the same how the cars and
| such also feel awkward.
|
| It doesn't detract from the gameplay much, and it's not
| like that makes the game bad, but personally I think that
| the Red Faction Guerilla game _felt_ a bit better. Of
| course, it was geared more towards presentation and had a
| large studio behind it, rather than being very
| technically accurate, so the goals are a bit different
| than those of Teardown (interesting setpieces vs
| procedural destruction).
|
| Here's a few random YouTube videos:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n16pZxHBo4o
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXmKlVZmvRg
|
| It is pretty awesome to see projects like either game,
| though! Even engines like VOXLAP were interesting:
| http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm That's actually more or
| less what powered the old Ace of Spades game, which is
| now Open Spades: https://openspades.yvt.jp/ (not as
| focused on destruction, but rather having large maps with
| lots of voxels, a fun game)
| yboris wrote:
| I wonder if you'll have a different feeling after seeing a
| _trailer_ instead of gameplay of the first mission ;)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttwBelIlLv8
|
| I'm not aware of any other real-scale voxel game out there.
| This one has water physics (things float), cars _are_
| destructible (you saw a construction vehicle that can take
| a lot more damage before noticeable deterioration), and
| more. Cheers!
| m000z0rz wrote:
| The physics of Teardown may not be realistic, but that's
| not what was asked for - and the physics of Teardown are
| DEFINITELY impressive.
| pastrami_panda wrote:
| It's not quite as easy as slapping on a good physics engine and
| call it a day.
|
| A good integration with a decent physics engine feels better
| in-game than a superb physics engine with a bad integration.
|
| When programming physics there's many ways of getting the
| desired behavior from the physics system, and as with all
| problem solving some solutions are better/more stable than
| others.
| arketyp wrote:
| I don't doubt there are compromises being made. I guess I'm
| just a bit surprised that immersion via realistic physics
| isn't in higher (and competing) demand. It also seems to me
| there could be a lot of interesting gameplay mechanics to
| explore there.
| Jensson wrote:
| There just isn't enough talent to make those games. People
| who are both good at programming and physics are very rare,
| and without them you are unlikely to produce programs that
| can use the physics system in reliable enough ways.
| efxhoy wrote:
| Embark Studios are making a game called "The Finals" which
| leans very heavily on destructionn. The trailer has some really
| impressive building collapses and other loud looking events:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X84w4DWEEes
| razormania wrote:
| They use PhysX with rust bindings for this.
| https://github.com/EmbarkStudios/physx-rs
| gooseserbus wrote:
| The Finals is an Unreal based game, not Rust, you can see
| the Unreal logo on their homepage:
| https://www.reachthefinals.com/
|
| They have a Rust game:
| https://medium.com/embarkstudios/embarks-creative-
| playground...
|
| Which maybe be using their PhysX bindings but it's not The
| Finals
| ozarker wrote:
| Embark was founded by a lot of the old school DICE guys.
| Really excited for what they bring to the table.
|
| Also iirc they are big on Rust and are supporting a lot of
| grassroots projects in the Rust gamedev space
| nullify88 wrote:
| The destruction in the trailers reminds me a lot of Bad
| Company 2 when it was possible to level the battlefield.
| Later games dumbed down the destruction or had scripted
| destruction sequences.
| dtagames wrote:
| I'm very impressed with Trine [0] and I noticed it has the
| Nvidia PhysX logo on startup. The entire game is based on
| physics puzzles and the graphics are gorgeous.
|
| [0] https://www.nintendo.com/store/products/trine-enchanted-
| edit...
| jmiskovic wrote:
| The Noita game features huge 2D levels where gasses and liquids
| interact with magic spells. Teardown has completely
| destructible voxel levels. BeamNG driving simulation implements
| soft bodies, various experiments with its physics are popular
| on youtube. I don't think any of these use PhysX.
| Pulcinella wrote:
| My only problem with Noita is that the back half of the game
| basically disregards most of the physics and chemistry
| systems. It's more based around exploiting the build-a-wand
| system so you can e.g. generate infinite black hole chainsaw
| spells that let you blast through rock at a million miles an
| hour.
|
| It is the only game I am aware of that I would say has a true
| "chemistry engine" along side its physics engine. (Though
| props to designers of Zelda BotW for giving objects internal
| properties besides just velocity & mass that facilitate
| reactions and interactions. Falling sand games that Noita
| takes a lot of inspiration also often have "chemistry"
| interactions but generally don't incorporate physics bodies
| and are more of a simulation toy box than a game).
| dmitriid wrote:
| It's the great unanswered question: what works in game
| design?
|
| It turns out wand building and extensive end-game/meta
| progression is far more engaging than most other things.
| IIRC there was more chemistry early on (I think there
| was/still is cooking?) and more rogue-like elements like
| satiation, but wand-building combined with the world
| physics turned out to be such immense fun, that it eclipsed
| everything else.
| abudabi123 wrote:
| A Kerbal Space Program with an on ramp to the world's
| observatory catalogs and focus on learning instruments and
| physics, theoretical and applied, would be awesome from Nvidia.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-alpha
| gowings97 wrote:
| The reason is money - it costs money (artists) to make
| destructible objects and art down for every conceivable way it
| can be broken/destroyed/manipulated.
|
| I hope/pray for a Battlefield 7 game that actually takes this
| seriously, but EA has run Battlefield into the ground.
| nullify88 wrote:
| Bad Company 2 came close to this and for me was probably the
| most fun and thrilling Battlefield game ever.
| 91edec wrote:
| Some ex-Dice guys are at Embark Studios and their next game
| seems to be bringing back destructible environments.
|
| Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYiP2cKHKs
|
| https://www.embark-studios.com/
| sorenjan wrote:
| All I could think when watching that trailer is "I'm
| getting too old for this".
|
| Also, relevant to this story, Embark does a lot of open
| source development in Rust, including physx-rs. The Finals
| is using Unreal Engine though.
| gowings97 wrote:
| Very cool, thanks for sharing
| haunter wrote:
| Death Stranding. Considering you traverse the world mostly on
| foot and packed up they nailed the terrain and how movement
| with heavy package works (imagine sherpas and mountaineers).
| evnix wrote:
| apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been
| any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray
| tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height
| of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago.
|
| I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't
| push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years
| behind gaming PCs.
| retSava wrote:
| Have you played The Last of Us part 2? The amount of details
| all over the world, smooth animations that blend midway into
| another, etc, really is a step forward imo.
| dagmx wrote:
| I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own
| visual senses than any factual effect.
|
| There's been so many advancements in the last ten years
| outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better
| character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching
| just off the top of my head.
|
| Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better
| for realism.
|
| One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk
| to see the big uplifts.
|
| 10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the
| PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is
| nonsensical at best
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| character motion being the same old animations, just
| done/interpolated better
|
| the only advancement I know of which got close to be
| implemented in games is
| https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think
| Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some
| point) - still haven't played anything using this though
| Arelius wrote:
| What a surface level take.
|
| Firstly, we've been doing the "same old animations" for a
| very long time, and in most areas of content.
|
| Secondly, they aren't they same old animations,
| technologies to produce them are becoming higher
| precision, more efficient, and better in many ways.
|
| Continuing on, the amount of work being poured into
| dynamic animation, IK, and the like is significant.
|
| Various locomotion systems, including AI4Animation that
| you linked are becoming significant contributions. Though
| crazy you single that out as an exception, because it is
| also using the "same old animations" just a large
| unstructured set of them. But this work is a direct
| continuation of motion matching, which also works on
| large datasets of unstructured animations, and *has*
| shipped in quite a few titles, and is a very significant
| jump in how animation is done today.
|
| And that's just animation.
|
| https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023280/Motion-Matching-
| and-Th...
| dagmx wrote:
| Your opinion here is highly ignorant.
|
| There's been tons of advancements on higher fidelity
| motion, better interaction , pose blending, constraint
| targeting, secondary motion, pose based deformation etc..
| Corazoor wrote:
| Cyberpunk 2077 at least pushed the rendering part of the
| engine into next-gen territory: Volumetric lightning and fog
| almost everywhere, environment reflection on even the
| smallest water surface and monochromatic light actually turns
| many surfaces into mirrors. All that in an outdoors setting
| with a ton of assets and an almost impracticle amount of
| verticality (no naturally empty half of the Screen). Before
| that release, most game devs would have told you that this is
| still impossible on todays hardware.
|
| But that engine also shows that you are not wrong with your
| remark about consoles holding progress back: The game barely
| ran on the ps4, and even on the ps5 you won't get stellar
| framerates... You need a really nice PC to run the thing
| smoothely...
| trentnelson wrote:
| It runs really, really smoothly on my Xbox Series X. I'd
| arguably say even smoother than my OC'd 10900K + RTX 3090
| PC.
| zokier wrote:
| 10 years is two console generations ago, 2012 was still
| ps3/xb360 era. If you don't notice any difference, then that
| is more explained by your lack of paying attention than lack
| of improvement.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| The pursuit of realism hit diminishing returns years ago; the
| manpower needed to make a game hyper-realistic isn't
| justified by the number of additional sales it will produce.
| Instead of becoming more realistic, most games have instead
| focused on having more bright neon particles swirling around
| on screen. That's much cheaper and much more effective than
| chasing further realism.
|
| This will likely change in the near future as the industry
| invents ways to replace human modelers, texture artists, etc,
| with automated "AI" tools.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| You are right, but I think it goes back and forth. I can
| recall seeing a game I was working on (Homefront 2?) where
| it looked surprisingly photo real - at least as a
| prototype. But the physics took you out of the illusion as
| soon as anything moved.
|
| Nowadays I see developers doing amazing things with
| shaders, like you said. And stylized models are easier to
| make, but also less in the uncanny valley.
|
| Realism can be cheaper when you don't care about
| optimizing, or AI can optimize for you. When you can scan
| in objects and it is workable in a game engine that's
| cheaper than designing them. We're there with mo-cap vs
| character animation.
| Rudism wrote:
| Outer Wilds has some impressive physics in that the whole game
| takes place in a miniature solar system where the planets orbit
| the sun, have their own gravity, day/night cycles, and so on.
| There are various weather phenomena, such as one planet that
| has floating islands tossed into space by storms before
| crashing back down, and a pair of planets named the "hourglass
| twins" that transfer sand between each other. You can fly out
| in your ship and watch these things happen at a macro level, or
| get right into it (like walking around one of those islands as
| it's being tossed into space, or getting yourself crushed by
| rising sand levels). It's really impressive, and I'm probably
| not doing it justice with this description. Worth checking out.
| brundolf wrote:
| Designers figured out that it's hard to make physics-based
| gameplay that's fun and interesting and doesn't break the game
| in various ways. Physics-driven games in the HL2 style are then
| almost their own genre - it has to be a conscious design choice
| - so most games don't try to make complex physics core to
| gameplay, they just use it as window-dressing. There's a lot of
| impressive window-dressing these days! But I don't think that's
| what you're talking about
|
| Zelda Breath of the Wild is a recent example where the
| designers went all-in on physics-based gameplay and did an
| amazingly impressive job with it. But the hard part wasn't the
| technology, it was everything else.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| Also realistic physics is very hard on multiplayer. The more
| detailed the simulation the more data you have to keep in
| sync.
| RunSet wrote:
| These are practically ancient in internet time but they are
| good examples of physics-based gameplay.
|
| https://jet.ro/dismount/
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| Seeing that just dredged up some ancient memories
| routerl wrote:
| BeamNG, the most physics intensive driving game ever made.
|
| https://youtu.be/Lqx2KKWI8aM
| saturn5k wrote:
| https://www.beamng.com/game/ - possibly the best driving / soft
| body physics out there..
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Is there much written about their sim approach?
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Answered my own question:
| https://wiki.beamng.com/JBeam_Physics_Theory.html
| michidk wrote:
| Then what about this?
| https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx
| xeromal wrote:
| That looks like 4.1
| whatwherewhy wrote:
| They don't follow semver. v4 is basically a completely separate
| product from v5.
| bri3d wrote:
| For what it's worth, PhysX 4.0 (2018) was also Open Source
| (3-clause BSD license).
|
| Previous discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589494
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've edited that bit out now. Thanks!
|
| (Submitted title was "Nvidia PhysX 5.0 is now open source")
| zmk5 wrote:
| I'm happy to see this! Hopefully Nvidia starts open sourcing a
| lot more stuff.
| dagmx wrote:
| PhysX has been source available since 2015 (3 clause BSD since
| 2018) , so I wouldn't take this as an indicator in that regard.
| m00dy wrote:
| right. what do you think about nvidia's recently released gpu
| drivers ?
| dagmx wrote:
| I think it's good , but doesn't change too much unless
| you're a kernel implementer.
|
| They've been busy moving the vast amount of the bits into
| the GPU firmware (not uncommon, this is how Apple and some
| others do it too).
|
| I think the FOSS crowd made a bigger deal of it than it was
| because it appealed to their sensibilities.
|
| The best new OSS-ish stuff from NVidia is their research,
| and things backing that research. They've released a lot of
| their nerf tech in the wild and Warp (a differential Python
| to CUDA transpiler) which are very cool.
| TkTech wrote:
| Not the person you're replying to, but those drivers are
| essentially just the communication bridge between the
| kernel and the "real" driver, which is mostly in the
| closed-source firmware blob. They're also woefully
| incomplete.
| djmips wrote:
| And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
| fps-hero wrote:
| Consoles and open source do not mix. NDAs prevent code
| using their APIs from being released.
|
| That said, a lot of open source projects have console
| ports, they just can't be shared publicly.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Steam Deck is in disagreement.
| dagmx wrote:
| Steam Deck isn't a console in any traditional sense
| unless we're just going to start butchering decades of
| colloquial nomenclature . It's a portable PC running
| desktop software from top down. Otherwise you might as
| well call my laptop running Steam Big Picture a console
| too.
|
| When the other people are talking about consoles, any
| sensible person knows they mean things like the
| PlayStation, Xbox or Switch.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| So the key distinguishing attribute that makes a "game
| console" a "game console" is its walled-garden nature?
| Nothing else?
|
| And not the fact that it's, you know, a "console" that
| can be used to play "games"?
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| > So the key distinguishing attribute that makes a "game
| console" a "game console" is its walled-garden nature?
| Nothing else?
|
| Practically? Yes, IMO. You can say it uses specialized
| hardware manufactured on a massive scale, with each gen
| being a distinct set of hardware with slight variations,
| but then you're describing an Apple M1 Macbook Air or
| Microsoft Surface.
|
| People have and will always gain root access, but the OEM
| doesn't typically like this, and goes out of their way to
| prevent it. There may be APIs the OEM leaves open to
| allow the creation of, for example, XMBC, but an XBox is
| hardly an open, general-purpose, computing platform.
|
| If you want to call it a console that can play games,
| then my custom-build Linux computer console fits that
| definition. Hell, I wouldn't have to even leave the
| computer console TUI to play Dwarf Fortress.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Playstation is a PC with extra lockdown. So is Xbox. The
| Switch is similar hardware to Nvidia Shield, which is
| just another general computer (it can run Nvidia's
| version of Ubuntu).
|
| So the differentiator these days seems to be running
| custom software.
|
| Which Steam Deck is also running.
|
| The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown".
| That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't
| make sense in the context of the original post
|
| > And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
| gunapologist99 wrote:
| Another definition of "console" might be "specialized
| and/or custom _hardware_ designed mostly for playing
| games " without regards to the software.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| That definition also captures the Steam Deck. And I think
| it's fine. It exposes that "console" being separate from
| "general purpose computer" is either an anachronism or a
| marketing ploy.
| djmips wrote:
| Indeed, nothing has changed. This is just a revision. PhysX 4
| source was available here.
| https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx/sour...
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| For the younger crowd, back in _the day_ before Nvidia bought
| Ageia, you 'd have to buy dedicated PhysX accelerator cards and
| stick them in your PC in order to use this tech in the few
| available games that supported it. Wild stuff.
|
| After that, PhysX API was accelerated via CUDA and the dedicated
| PhysX ASICs were discontinued.
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/review/bfg-ageia-physx-card/
| pacaro wrote:
| We used the PhysX engine in a simulated environment for
| robotics development back in that timeframe. I don't think more
| than one or two people on the team had the accelerator cards,
| but it worked surprisingly well just on a vanilla hardware
| rasz wrote:
| Dont forget to mention it was pure scam, PhysX PCI
| "accelerator" actually ran those supported games slower,
| sometimes Two times slower, than software.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/2001/4
| dagmx wrote:
| You miss the important bits:
|
| > As we said before, installing the hardware automatically
| enables higher quality physics. We can't get a good idea of
| how much better the PhysX hardware would perform than the
| CPU, but we can see a couple facts very clearly.
|
| So what you call a scam is down to implementation details. In
| a true like for like scenario the PPU would usually
| outperform the CPU implementation as long as your sync
| boundaries were clean to get stuff back from it, and pipe the
| transforms back to the GPU.
|
| I wish people like yourself wouldn't reach for incendiary
| language by default. It ruins any and all nuance in
| discussion.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| A more nuanced description is that in most cases, it was
| slower, and it took immense developer effort to even try to
| make it faster. And the cases that were accelerated were
| generally things that consumers didn't care much about,
| e.g. fluid dynamics.
|
| The software is the clear winner of that. The team was
| fantastic, and one of them (John Ratcliff) helped kickstart
| my career. So it isn't entirely off base to say that the
| PPU was... exaggerated.
| rasz wrote:
| Its a game, the important bit is playable framerate. There
| arent any nuances when you are hitting drops to 17 fps.
|
| >down to implementation details
|
| Game is running 2 times slower. Nvidia favorite kind of
| technology. Tessellation, Gameworks, Hairworks, RTX, all
| run at lest 2x slower when enabled unless you buy Nvidia
| flagship hardware.
|
| Did you know Nvidia physx library shipped compiled for FPU?
| At the time SSE2 was available for 10 years and SSE3 for 5
| https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/07/did-nvidia-cripple-
| it... https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/3/ Nvidia PR
| person tried claiming Physx actual computation is not a
| bottleneck, so they didnt bother optimizing :D If its not a
| bottleneck then why run it on GPU?
| jansan wrote:
| Interesting. What was the target group of these cards? Gamers
| or engineers and scientists?
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| This is from later (2012) but shows some of the effects that
| PhysX enables in games. The "apex turbulence" in the second
| half of the video is pretty cool.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qhaEghJ74
| dagmx wrote:
| It started out initially for academic usecases till the costs
| came down and it was then pushed for games.
| driscoll42 wrote:
| Mostly gamers, here's a review from Arkham Asylum which
| showed how offloading PhysX to a GT 220 paired with a GTX 260
| would help a fair bit with minimum and average FPS -
| https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-
| asylum,24...
| gabereiser wrote:
| Even after the acquisition, people still used dedicated PhysX
| cards before multi-monitor screen stitching made SLI graphics
| visual based. Prior, you'd have a card in SLI to handle the
| physics for PhysX and the other for the visual rendering.
|
| This is great news. Bullet and others could benefit from this
| as well.
| mmahemoff wrote:
| Now they should reach for the stars and update the README with a
| project description.
| [deleted]
| djmips wrote:
| Probably should remove the 'now open source' part of the
| headline.
|
| Nvidia's own marketing page about the 5.0 release.
|
| https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/open-source-simulation-exp...
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Right, that page says "All CPU source code is available under
| the simple BSD3 open source license, and NVIDIA GPU binaries
| are included at no cost." So only the CPU code is now Open
| Source.
|
| Also, if you are building a game, wouldn't you want it to work
| on AMD GPU's too?
| speps wrote:
| Note this isn't really fully open source as the CUDA kernels for
| PhysX aren't distributed and the HLSL code for Flow isn't
| included either (only Vulkan and DX12 bytecode is included, no
| sources). Happy to be wrong if someone finds the code for these
| :)
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-11-08 23:01 UTC)