How PhysX runs on Nvidia and AMD (ATI) systems

[Vancha]

Originally Posted by nathanebht

Vancha, if your running 1280 x 1024, I'd suggest a new monitor the next time your in the market. Whatever your PC buying budget is, split it in half. Half goes to the monitor and half the PC. You'll have the LCD for much longer than you keep that PC.

I've had this PC through the lifetime of my last LCD and some years through this one. I have a single core AMD 64 3500+ and 1gig DDR 333mhz RAM. I have an ATI 3850, but only because my Nvidia 7800GTX fried.

I fully intend to get a new monitor along with a new everything else, but I haven't been able to be in the market for a long, long time.

[Rbstr]

Originally Posted by nathanebht

Vancha, if your running 1280 x 1024, I'd suggest a new monitor the next time your in the market. Whatever your PC buying budget is, split it in half. Half goes to the monitor and half the PC. You'll have the LCD for much longer than you keep that PC.

This is silly advice. A good 24inch 1080p costs less than $200.

If that's half your budget on a PC you don't have the budget to get something worthwhile.

[Goku]

Originally Posted by nathanebht

Your Nvidia / AMD stats are off Atranox. Its 59% Nvidia to 33% AMD. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Not everyone has Steam. That survey is lets you choose whether or not you want Steam to collect the info. The survey has no barring on what the current market looks like. Really the market is 50/50 with each quarter going back and forth to each company's favor.

Wow that is old Vancha. I have been through 3 builds, since my 939 Athlon X2 4200+.

[TerminatorUK]

Kinda hoping it will be the CPU version of PhysX (must admit I didn't know there were variants of the technology) after investing on a Radeon HD 5970 in November 2009 that is still going strong.

That being said, I'm a sad enough fan of Planetside to trade up and get an NVIDIA GPU (which I do like...my last rig was a x2 8800GTX SLI setup) simply for Planetside 2 if it gave even a tiny bit of extra performance.

Not quite on topic but I'm hoping that Planetside 2 will have proper SLI / Crossfire support / scaling (I'd be suprised if it didn't these days). At the moment I'm having to use a utility called RadeonPro to disable Crossfire (easier said than done on a 5970!) for Planetside 1 as it causes insane flickering on-screen with it enabled.

[Atranox]

Originally Posted by nathanebht

Your Nvidia / AMD stats are off Atranox. Its 59% Nvidia to 33% AMD. http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Using AMD myself, still does excellent in games while at the same time sending very nice HDMI 7.1 sound to my receiver.

Vancha, if your running 1280 x 1024, I'd suggest a new monitor the next time your in the market. Whatever your PC buying budget is, split it in half. Half goes to the monitor and half the PC. You'll have the LCD for much longer than you keep that PC.

The Steam numbers are not entirely accurate.

For example, the Q1 and Q2 sales for NVIDIA this year have been 22.5% and 20.0% respectively. The numbers include integrated. Their total market share has dropped by 28.8% since Q4 2009. These are based on their quarterly reports.

As for the NVIDIA vs AMD debate, both companies are very solid. Based on reviews, neither brand has a major overall advantage. Price/performance on both is better than ever.

[tjmonk15]

This whole PhysX situation confuses the hell out of me.

I understand PhysX it self and what it does/implies. What I'm confused on is this: How can a client-side technology help with a authoritative-server MMO?

I mean, vehicles fish tailing, bullet drop, flight mechanics.... in an authoritative-server environment need to be server side.

Unless I'm missing something obvious?

The only thing I can think of is that they are using PhysX server-side for the physics, and then sending that data client side and the client-side PhysX will apply it to client-side entities. But then this cuts down on bandwidth severely.

So.... anyone have any insight?

-Monk

[Lunarchild]

Originally Posted by Goku

Get off those old resolutions. I cannot understand how you guys can stand playing on those. The added viewing in games is easily worth the upgrade.

Right now anything above a GTX 550 Ti or 5770 is complete overkill for 1280x1024 and under. My 4670 was more then playable at that resolution.

Lunar what are you using to have 120 screens??

I actually may grab a ASUS VG236HE that is 23 inches, 1920x1080, and most of all 120Hz. I really want to see if there is a difference. If I get it from Best Buy and don't care for it I can just return it for free .

120 screens? I wish

Anyhow, got the 24" Acer one. Overall I'm not an Acer fan, but the screen is pretty good overall! The slower screen is a cheap 28" one. Going to need to replace that sometimes... Probably when I get a job again.

[Bags]

Originally Posted by Lunarchild

120 screens? I wish

Anyhow, got the 24" Acer one. Overall I'm not an Acer fan, but the screen is pretty good overall! The slower screen is a cheap 28" one. Going to need to replace that sometimes... Probably when I get a job again.

Ooh, I wonder if we have the same monitor. Mine's a 24" acer too. Does yours have touch screen buttons for adjusting Contrast and etc?

[Lunarchild]

Originally Posted by Bags

Ooh, I wonder if we have the same monitor. Mine's a 24" acer too. Does yours have touch screen buttons for adjusting Contrast and etc?

Nop, it has actually fixed buttons. Which is a LOT better, because I can never get the power buttons on those monitors with capacitive buttons to work properly ^^ It's this one btw: http://www.techradar.com/reviews/pc-...-908747/review

[Bags]

Oh, my power button is an actual button, the rest are touch screen, and contrary to all of the reviews I read, work fine.

I got this one: http://www.ebay.com/ctg/Acer-H243H-2...itor-/78689742

[artifice]

Originally Posted by Rbstr

This is silly advice. A good 24inch 1080p costs less than $200.

If that's half your budget on a PC you don't have the budget to get something worthwhile.

Depends on your definition of good. I don't consider anything less than an IPS screen as good.

[Princess Frosty]

Here's the thing with PhysX

The amount of people running GPU's or PPU's that are capable of the more advanced PhysX effects, such as liquid and cloth, are very small. Developers simply aren't going to put these effects into games until everyone can use them, the few games that do decide to use these effects are going to have them tagged on as extras and they're never going to be meaningful to gameplay, they will simply be nicer graphical effects.

I don't like PhysX if I'm honest, it's Nvidia trying to corner the market on physics and that's never a good thing for gamers and we've already seen very good examples of this so far. For example the CPU performance of the more complex physics simulations is VERY BAD, it will only use about 50% of your CPU power, if you play something like Batman Arkham Asylum and enable advanced PhysX on the CPU, then check your CPU usage on something like a quad core, the entire game engine is not using more than about 50% of the CPU (about 50% on each core)

And why would Nvidia want to make it good for the CPU? They sell GPU's not CPUs, they want you to buy and Nvidia card, this is why them trying to corner the market is bad. There are much better physics libraries out there such as Havock which actually run really well on the CPU.

Until PhysX adoption is nearly 100% all we'll ever see is simply more pretty effects with more particles and whatnot, otherwise developers will be ruling out large portions of their player base. It will never be important to the game play, PhysX on the GPU is very bad at communicating with the rest of the game code which is running on the CPU so the PhysX information for simulated cloth and fluid will never be more than just nicer graphics it will never affect game play.

My prediction is that physics will be done on the CPU for Planetside for things like bullet trajectories and probably stuff like destruction in future as well as vehicle handling. If there are any advanced effects that need the GPU they will just be to make the game more pretty, probably cloth simulated flags and more particles in explosions.

[Princess Frosty]

Originally Posted by tjmonk15

This whole PhysX situation confuses the hell out of me.

I understand PhysX it self and what it does/implies. What I'm confused on is this: How can a client-side technology help with a authoritative-server MMO?

I mean, vehicles fish tailing, bullet drop, flight mechanics.... in an authoritative-server environment need to be server side.

Unless I'm missing something obvious?

The only thing I can think of is that they are using PhysX server-side for the physics, and then sending that data client side and the client-side PhysX will apply it to client-side entities. But then this cuts down on bandwidth severely.

So.... anyone have any insight?

-Monk

What generally happens in netcode is that both the client and server calculates all game important physics (physics that can actually affect gameplay), the client uses the result of the calculation to display the result to the user immediately so there is no latency involved with gameplay.

The server essentially does the same and sends each client periodic updates, the client looks at the new data and if the client disagrees with the server it corrects the necessary client side properties to match. If you're talking about the position of a vehicle for example then slight differences in position are resolved by the client moving from it's current position to the correct one using a Lerp (Linear interpolation) function, it basically smooths the current client side movement so you don't jerk around all over the place.

Some physics will not be important to gameplay such as ones that drive graphical effects and since these cannot effect other players they're not updated across the network.

Generally speaking a legit client should never differ from the server in any significant way, a client simulating the same variables comes to the same conclusion as the server. The only difference comes from other players interactions, the server gets these updates first and based on other players altering the battlefield may come to different conclusions than the client and it's under these circumstances the server corrects the client with the "real" information.

[tjmonk15]

So it is literally for nothing except client-side prediction.... Seems like a waste...

[wildcat140679]

Source Nvidia
"Most games that use PhysX rely on it for gameplay physics such as collision detection, rigid body dynamics, rag dolls, scene queries, vehicle controllers and character controllers, etc. This type of physics is always run on a CPU because it needs to be tightly integrated with other game systems such as animation, AI and rendering."

"Effects such as destruction, simulated smoke or fog, clothing, etc., can be run on the GPU"

In a nut shell, all game play elements like vehicle handling, flight physic's, bullet trajectories and collision detection are equal across the boards for it runs on the CPU. So a Nvidia player will NOT have an edge over an Ati(AMD) player, because his GPU can assist with the PhysX calculations.

All the Eye Candy related stuff that enhances the looks of explosions, water effects, cloth, smoke and so on can be accelerated by a GPU, yet they can still be calculated by a CPU, but the are not very good at it compared to a GPU.

If you don't have a PhysX enabled GPU, I'm very certain that you will still get bullets bouncing around and derbies flying around in explosions, but far less detailed and a smaller amount of derbies flying around as when you have a GPU who can process those PhysX calculations. Games already support this, I'm very sure PS2 will to.

So if you don't have an Nvidia GPU able to handle PhysX calculations, I'm very certain the only thing you'll be missing out on is the Eye Candy.