Hope you weren’t planning to play PhysX games on Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs
Nvidia’s done with PhysX, it seems.
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33099518
TLDR: NVIDIA removed support for PhysX with the 50 series GPUs, resulting in worse performance with PhysX games than previous GPU generations
Nvidia got what it wanted from Ageia when they bought PhysX, and that was improvements to CUDA.
I've had enough of NVIDIA to the point I'm not planning on playing anything on one of their GPUs ever again.
Are there really any 32-bit era games that your CPU can't handle, especially if you have a $1k+ gpu? This post is honestly pretty misleading as it implies modern versions of PhysX don't work, when they actually do.
That being said, it doesn't make all that much sense as a decision, doubles are rare in most GPU code anyways (as they are very slow), NVIDIA is just being lazy and doesn't want to write the drivers for that
Well, at least you aren't on mac where 32 bit things just don't launch at all... (I think they might be playable through wine, but even in the x86 era MacOS didn't natively run any 32 bit games or software, so games like Portal 2 or TF2 for example just didn't work even though they had a MacOS version)
You never know when old games just don't work. For example I recently tried to play deus ex mankind divided. I have new hardware but I had to play on medium settings because anything higher would start killing performance despite the game being 5 years older than my hardware.
I wouldn't be surprised if some older games ran like shit on the 50 series cards whenever physx is concerned.
mirrors edge drops to under 10 fps when breaking glass which generates physx objects... with a 9800x3d.
the current physx cpu implementation is artificially shit, the cpu can easily handle it nowadays but it depends on skilled community members or nvidia themselves to unshit it.
Hmm, I was not aware of that. I've seen (not Nvidia related) simulations with probably tens of thousands of rigidbodies running on relatively old midrange CPUs in real time, so it's pretty crazy that it's that slow.
nVidia doesn't really have that many successful unshits, historically speaking, do they?
I'm too poor to worry about this. My wife bought eggs recently
So you had an egg in these trying times, did you?
My wife had to start laying her own.
I'm so sorry you needed eggs
The eggs have insane physics reactions though. So I got that going for me.
DECEARING EGG
Wow. I probably have played 4 or 5 on that entire list. And none of them in the past 5 or so years.
It's still a shitty thing to do for sure. Maybe there will be a new "thing" that starts getting used instead? Ray tracing has gotten way more coverage than PhysX ever did, and imo is like 3% as good or interesting.
Physics actually have gameplay interactions that matter. Ray tracing looks nice, but is so absolutely expensive computationally that (imo) is not even CLOSE to being worth the effort if turning on, even with compatible hardware.
Give us better physics, games! My main time sink rn is Rocket League, and that game is literally nothing but physics. Mostly simple physics, but stuff behaving in a logical way makes my brain a lot happier than better lighting ever did.
I like when y'all grass became an actual object that could be moved around by players, or when tossing an item on the ground actually does it tossed down and colliding with other objects while texting to them appropriately (as in fire starting, or weight holding something down a certain amount). That stuff is potentially game creating, definitely feature drinking.
Has anything AT ALL been affected by "pretty lights" beyond making them pretty? If it has, I've never heard of it.
Keep games about a gameplay experience, not just a visual feast. Save that tech for movies or playable stories (ie Telltale type). Focus only on the gameplay experience otherwise. Toss in some ray tracing when you can, but NEVER at the expense of physics. It just doesn't make any sense.
Lol keep buying Nvidia!
I actually wasn't, no, planning to ride this 30 series out for about a decade.
Guess I'll have to dust off my old dedicated PhysX card from the mid 2000's. Shit... I think that thing is AGP not even PCIE 🤔
PhysX cards were PCI. Motherboards only had one AGP slot and that was for the GPU.
It only ever got deployed in a few dozen games
Is the only sentence in the entire article you need to be aware of.
This is rage-bait.
This is a list of the games it affects:
this is an incomplete list. as per the wiki article:
PhysX in Video Games
PhysX technology is used by game engines such as Unreal Engine (version 3 onwards), Unity, Gamebryo, Vision (version 6 onwards), Instinct Engine, Panda3D, Diesel, Torque, HeroEngine, and BigWorld.
As one of the handful of major physics engines, it is used in many games, such as The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Warframe, Killing Floor 2, Fallout 4, Batman: Arkham Knight, Planetside 2, and Borderlands 2. Most of these games use the CPU to process the physics simulations.
Video games with optional support for hardware-accelerated PhysX often include additional effects such as tearable cloth, dynamic smoke, or simulated particle debris.
PhysX in Other Software
Other software with PhysX support includes:
- Active Worlds (AW), a 3D virtual reality platform with its client running on Windows
- Amazon Lumberyard, a 3D game development engine developed by Amazon
- Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya, and Autodesk Softimage, computer animation suites
- DarkBASIC Professional (with DarkPHYSICS upgrade), a programming language targeted at game development
- DX Studio, an integrated development environment for creating interactive 3D graphics
- ForgeLight, a game engine developed by the former Sony Online Entertainment
- Futuremark's 3DMark06 and Vantage benchmarking tools
- Microsoft Robotics Studio, an environment for robot control and simulation
- Nvidia's SuperSonic Sled and Raging Rapids Ride, technology demos
- OGRE (via the NxOgre wrapper), an open source rendering engine
- The Physics Abstraction Layer, a physical simulation API abstraction system (it provides COLLADA and Scythe Physics Editor support for PhysX)
- Rayfire, a plug-in for Autodesk 3ds Max that allows fracturing and other physics simulations
- The Physics Engine Evaluation Lab, a tool designed to evaluate, compare, and benchmark physics engines
- Unreal Engine game development software by Epic Games. Unreal Engine 4.26 and onwards has officially deprecated PhysX.
- Unity by Unity ApS. Unity's Data-Oriented Technology Stack does not use PhysX.
That's misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won't notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there's no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it's not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.
Yeah, and a great post too - because some of your points here just point out that everyone ELSE have deprecated PhysX as well. Unity and Unreal both dropped it long ago. It's basically a moot point for 99.9% of people playing games.
Instead of using a PPU on the GPU, most people have focused on GPGPU physics calculations instead. The idea behind PhysX was a difficult one to launch in the first place. Given that most chip real-estate is going to these VPUs, I'm not surprised at all that they ditched the PPU for a more generalized version.
I play several of those games
That list has some incredibly popular games on it... Hardly rage bait if you'll get worse performance in the greatest AC game to have come out.
Yeah you are going to get "horrible" 100fps lows in AC4 and borderlands 2 whit physx enabled.
How many of the two dozen games affected were already capped engine wise to 60 or 30fps because of console ports? If you can afford 5000-series then you probably also have a processor that can more than enough offset the GPUs workload. AC4 for example came out when gtx 980 was bleeding edge. It's just what AMD GPU users have been living with for decades, and not even really noticing. Even my three gen old low tier AMD laptop with integrated graphics can eek out 30+ fps in mirrors edge with physX on and all graphics maxed. I'm sure all of these games will be fine.
CPU accelerated physics were severeley dumbed down to make PhysX look better and there are several high profile games on that list that will forever have physics stupidified because of corporate BS back then that affects them now.
I played Mirrors Edge a bit. The only part of physx in the game that I remember, as i didn't finish it, was that there were some random curtains that would blow in the wind and weren't placed anywhere where they would actually matter
Mirror's Edge actually had a place with tons of broken glass falling down, where the framerate would drop into the single digits if it used CPU PhysX. I remember that because it shipped with an outdated PhysX library that would run on the CPU even though I had an Nvidia GPU, so I had to delete the game's PhysX library to force it to use the version from the graphics driver, in order to get it to playable performance. If you didn't have an Nvidia driver you would need to disable PhysX for that segment to be playable.
The only part of physx in that game that I remember is that it used to cause massive performance and stability issues.
The enshittification of green has begun
They laser off the vcpu feature from the chip just so you can't use it at the same time as another family member. They spend extra money to make it worse.
wdym?
It's too bad the CPU path for PhysX is crappy. It would be a good use of the many cores/threads we have available to us these days.
The more you buy the more you save
My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.
64-bit compiled games are fine.
No, the card is broken. Only suitable for newer games.