News: Enable PhysX with latest NVidia Beta

[typhaon]

I found it to have a negative gameplay impact when I'm using shotguns/scatterguns... especially indoors... screen fills with sparks and I actually lose track of targets.

Looks cool.. but leaving it off for serious gameplay.

[NotTheMomma]

Originally Posted by Chinchy

I find that forcing GPU physics on but not forcing PhysX on increases my frame rate by a total of 40 frames in a good battle.

So, to clarify, you did this by only adding "ForceGpuPhysics=1"?

Since I'm CPU-bound in medium to large battles, that sounds much better than pretty sparkles and flying rocks.

[maradine]

I did this for the hell of it - two notes:

1. The particle state update seems to be decoupled from the general refresh rate. It was disconcerting.

2. Under heavy flak, framerate dropped through the floor. That's obviously a no-go for me.

Pretty, but turned it off.

[Micro]

YES! Well, let's see how the FPS goes...

[Sledgecrushr]

I watched Luperza play last night and she has physx forced on. I have to say that the new physx particle effects are rediculously awesome. Of course none of that stuff has been optimized and she is running a beast system. If you have some good hardware then you need to at least give it a try. Im saving my pennies so I can play this game in all of its glory.

[Nutleyboy]

I gave it a go. In game fine trying to record it bah

[Loban]

Originally Posted by Ruzy

My only question is this: When I die, my non-physX body stops where its at. If my physX body goes flying off a cliff, will a medic still be able to revive me? As a medic will I be resurrecting invisible bodies, or chasing them down hills?

I think you're confusing physx with ragdoll physics. Physx has nothing to do with the way your character or any other object animates/moves, dead or otherwise. It's simply eye candy, nothing more. Bodies aren't going to go flying, until they add ragdoll physics to PS2, which they've been considering.

[wasdie]

Originally Posted by Loban

I think you're confusing physx with ragdoll physics. Physx has nothing to do with the way your character or any other object animates/moves, dead or otherwise. It's simply eye candy, nothing more. Bodies aren't going to go flying, until they add ragdoll physics to PS2, which they've been considering.

Not 100% true. Their current implementation of PhysX is powering all of the physics for the vehicles and I'm going to guess some player collision with the environment. It will eventually handle the ragdoll animations for characters. That's why it's on the roadmap, it's not a very difficult thing to do client side but server side (tracking the ragdolls) is much more difficult.

PhysX does have a CPU bound version that they use so that AMD users can still play the game. It's good for stuff that CPU physics are enough for (basic vehicle handling, basic ragdoll physics, basic collision). With PhysX you cna defer all physics calculations to a GPU which can improve performance in general as the GPU is a much better device to do the physics processing. GPUs have so much power that they can also give a game plenty of overhead to do serious amounts of mass physics calculations.

PhysX is free (or really cheap) and provided by Nvidia. It is a good replacement for very expensive physics engines (like Havok) but only Nvidia users can get the most out of it. There are open source solutions that mimic what PhysX can do that are on both Nvidia and AMD cards, but they are open source and not as well documented/supported. A game dev is much more likely to choose something they can get support from.

So far a bunch of games are implementing various versions of PhysX. ArmA 3 is and I cannot wait.

[SixShooter]

I tried this out for a bit today and it's certainly pretty but the loss of framerate means that I'll wait for further optimizations before I use it any more. Also, after a while I started getting some pretty bad framerate stutter.

I tried with just the ForceGpuPhysics=1 and did not see any improvement in FPS. I'm using a single 660 ti right now but I have a 550 ti that I might add in and dedicate PhysX on that one and try it again.

[NotTheMomma]

Originally Posted by SixShooter

I tried with just the ForceGpuPhysics=1 and did not see any improvement in FPS. I'm using a single 660 ti right now but I have a 550 ti that I might add in and dedicate PhysX on that one and try it again.

Good to know, thanks.

[duomaxwl]

Makes me crash.
I'll wait until official I guess.

[Lee]

So did anybody try with a dedicated physX card and experienced FPS loss?

[Riekopo]

I'm not using beta drivers and I can use it.

[Sironn]

I updated my NVIDIA driver to 314 today and activated the PhysX (set both parameter: [Rendering] ForceGpuPhysics=1 GpuPhysics=1). In WG with graphics set to high there were 40 fps with my gtx660 before and up to 50 fps now (+10 fps ). With some real nice particle effects after the PhysX-activation.