nvidia's physX out

[SoM]

been playing Warmonger on a 8800GTS all maxed and it plays very smooth using PhysX.

anyone try it yet?

[Foo]

how do you add it, driver update or otherwise?

[SoM]

just installed new drivers, thats it.

[SoM]

http://www.nvidia.com/content/forcewith ... wnload.asp

[Scourge]

Been waiting for this.

[Captain]

Gonna install it later.

[AmIdYfReAk]

Humm, so the three way SLI May actually have a purpose now.

[Foo]

This is the move that physics needed for it to take off properly.

Hopefully the ATI PhysX thing takes off as well and the whole thing moves forwards.

[obsidian]

Didn't ATI go with Havoc? In which case there still won't be a standard API for developers to work with. Or did I miss some news about ATI and PhysX?

[Plan B]

Is this driver based on the latest whql driver (175.19)?
My card runs well on that and I don't really want to bog it down.

I don't really see many games that support PhysX. Mainly some Unreal-engined ones.
TBH I don't really understand why developers shouldn't focus on letting the CPU handle physics.
Does a GPU really have that much unused processing power?

[Foo]

For the same reason they don't focus on letting CPU handle graphics. Its a specialist kind of application which runs best on hardware tailored towards it.

[obsidian]

CPUs are general processors that are good for calculating different kinds of math equations. Physics (among other things) tend to use a lot of floating-point numbers which a CPU can do, but doesn't exactly excel at.

You could spend money on a separate floating-point processor such as a physics card, but that's extra money out of your wallet and it isn't as if physics simulations are entirely all that important. Better yet, you can just let an existing floating-point processor already in your computer do the physics processing, namely the GPU.

So, it's not that the GPU has unused processing power, so much as the CPU sucking at floating-point physics calculations.

[Scourge]

I have a XFX 9800 GTX XXX and in the warmonger game and crysis it seems to take quite a load off. I'll post some comparison screens later. It seems to be a step forward for me.

[Captain]

Didn't change anything for me. Still averaging 30fps in Crysis with everything on 'very high' with DX10.

[Scourge]

The fps weren't really that much higher, but the performance was much better even in the big firefights. Still need to test it in UT3 though. Also MOHA.

[SoM]

I have a XFX 9800 GTX XXX and in the warmonger game and crysis it seems to take quite a load off. I'll post some comparison screens later. It seems to be a step forward for me.

i've noticed the same thing.

latest crysis, stalker, runs even more smoother for me at maxed settings

[SoM]

Didn't change anything for me. Still averaging 30fps in Crysis with everything on 'very high' with DX10.

vista + dx10 = joke

kthxbye

[Plan B]

Foo and obsidian, sorry for harping on about this, but I just don't understand how it works.
You basically shift that floating point processing from the CPU to the GPU.
You assign GPU-processing power to do physics. Must that not come at the expense of the GPU's core business; graphics?
I read some about it, but it's always assumed that you can just throw that load on there.

[obsidian]

Your computer is only as fast as it's slowest component, or in this case, whatever takes the longest to process. CPU's are pretty bad at processing huge amounts of floating-point calculations, GPU's are designed almost specifically for them.

If you are processing physics on the CPU and it is slow at doing it, everything else may have to wait for the CPU to finish crunching. The GPU even though it's working hard on the graphics, will still have to wait for the physics calculations to finish on the CPU before everything syncs and gets displayed. What you get is a bit of lag because everything is waiting on the CPU.

If you do the physics calculations on the GPU, it'll be slightly more work for the GPU, but since it is that much more efficient at floating-point calculations, it doesn't take it that long and the physics and graphics rendering will be properly synchronized together, therefore less lag. The GPU doesn't consider the extra load to be all that great. So while you may end up with a slight frame rate drop in certain cases due to the extra load, in general you are eliminating much of the lag that would have been caused by waiting on the CPU. Lag being the greater of the two evils, you still get an overall performance increase.

[Captain]

I have a XFX 9800 GTX XXX and in the warmonger game and crysis it seems to take quite a load off. I'll post some comparison screens later. It seems to be a step forward for me.

Which CPU are you running? For me it's the C2D E6750 2.6 4MB cache O/Ced to 3.3.

[Plan B]

Thanks, obsidian. Very elucidating.

[Scourge]

Which CPU are you running? For me it's the C2D E6750 2.6 4MB cache O/Ced to 3.3.

This one. No o/c yet.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819103226