News: Small game update this week

[Shogun]

Originally Posted by AThreatToYou

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Why the fuck are shadow effects being rendered on the CPU?
Is this some sort of hack to allow for idiots trying to play PS2 on an integrated graphics card to work better?

wow. i didn´t know this.
it should really be mentioned in the video settings what is rendered on cpu and what on gpu, so people would be able to tweak the settings according to their system setup.

i am cpu bound all the time, so decreasing shadow quality or even turning shadows off could help me. but i always thought shadow is a gpu thing and turned it to maximum because my gpu never was the problem.

[NotTheMomma]

I believe it's because the shadows are generated by the physics engine, which uses the CPU.

(The physics engine that PS2 uses is [NVIDIA-owned] PhysX, which somewhat confusingly has the same name as the proprietary NVIDIA GPU particle effects and enhanced debris [eye-candy]. You cannot, currently, force the important physics [like vehicle collision] to GPU, even using an NVIDIA card.)

From what I understand, this is all processed on the CPU, because the GPU, while efficient, disrupts the necessary timing and synchronization.