Hope you weren’t planning to play PhysX games on Nvidia’s new 50-series GPUs
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
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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:
- Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
- Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
- Crazy Machines 2
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction
- Hot Dance Party
- QQ Dance
- Hot Dance Party II
- Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
- Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
- Mirror's Edge
- Armageddon Riders
- Darkest of Days
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Sacred 2: Ice & Blood
- Shattered Horizon
- Star Trek DAC
- Metro 2033
- Dark Void
- Blur
- Mafia II
- Hydrophobia: Prophecy
- Jianxia 3
- Alice: Madness Returns
- MStar
- Batman: Arkham City
- 7554
- Depth Hunter
- Deep Black
- Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage
- The Secret World
- Continent of the Ninth (C9)
- Borderlands 2
- Passion Leads Army
- QQ Dance 2
- Star Trek
- Mars: War Logs
- Metro: Last Light
- Rise of the Triad
- The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
- Batman: Arkham Origins
- Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
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.
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.
well, sorta. some engines like unreal have indeed dropped physx (in fact that's the only one that's in there as having dropped it), but there are some heavy hitters in there. unity did not drop it as far as i know, but they have a separate version without it that's not made for games.
i also happen to know that ARMA 3, which is not on the list, is a heavy physx user. so i don't know how accurate any of our lists actually are.
my takeaway from this list is that if nvidia follows suit with their AX series and other pro cards, they are going to lose significant market share with the CAD and CFD crowd, because those guys have 40 year old codebases and they are not going to be happy that they have to rewrite a subsystem.
PhysX has just been a CUDA application for a long time, there's not been a dedicated PPU on any card in a very long time
I don't think there has ever been a PPU on the GPU. It did originally run on PPU cards by Ageia, but AFAIK PhysX on GPU:s used CUDA GPGPU right from the start.
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.
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.
No those games are not fine on 50 series GPUs, they can actually drop down to 10 fps or lower
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.
Ah, the good old days 😂 having to manually fix drivers but with limited help from the internet
I disagree; people on the internet were a lot more helpful back then. These days it's difficult to get people to care about anything, let alone compel them to help.
The only part of physx in that game that I remember is that it used to cause massive performance and stability issues.