PhysX on a CPU likely to see very little benefit from SSE recompile

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Originally Posted by SKYMTL

Rather, show us that a CPU can do it WELL and then show how much BETTER a GPU can do it.

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A GPU company should fully optimize its software for CPUs first before its own products? That makes no sense, either from a business or marketing perspective. It's up to the CPU guys to demonstrate the power of their hardware.

who says they optimize for gpus? they constantly have games bloated with pointless things so you need to buy a beefier gpu to enjoy stuff

Who are they?

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Originally Posted by trinibwoy

A GPU company should fully optimize its software for CPUs first before its own products? That makes no sense, either from a business or marketing perspective. It's up to the CPU guys to demonstrate the power of their hardware.

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No one said "before".

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Originally Posted by SKYMTL

No one said "before".

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What about "ever"? See, I find it funny that people are holding Nvidia (a GPU company) responsible for making use of their multi-core CPUs. If there is a problem with their marketing claims about GPUs being faster than CPUs at physics processing it is up to the CPU guys to prove those claims wrong. That's just common sense.

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Originally Posted by trinibwoy

What about "ever"? See, I find it funny that people are holding Nvidia (a GPU company) responsible for making use of their multi-core CPUs. If there is a problem with their marketing claims about GPUs being faster than CPUs at physics processing it is up to the CPU guys to prove those claims wrong. That's just common sense.

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No, it's not. NVIDIA holds the rights to the software and they are the ones making the claims.

If Ford claims their car gets better gas mileage than a Chevy, it's up to Ford to spend the money and back up their claims with data. In addition, if they make a comparison they wouldn't saddle their Chevy comparison car with square tires and still claim it gets worse gas mileage.

It's obvious to me that PhysX CAN take full advantage of multiple cores so why not ensure that developers are given the proper starting point to implement it? If they would, I am sure that PhysX would be used in a MANY more games (like Havok).

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Originally Posted by SKYMTL

If Ford claims their car gets better gas mileage than a Chevy, it's up to Ford to spend the money and back up their claims with data. In addition, if they make a comparison they wouldn't saddle their Chevy comparison car with square tires and still claim it gets worse gas mileage.

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No, but they wouldn't go dismantle the Chevy and rebuild it either so that it has improved performance. They would take it as is, just like Nvidia did with the Novodex API. In this case there is no Chevy though. That would imply that there is a competing API that runs advanced physics routines on the CPU, which of course doesn't exist.

http://www.geeks3d.com/20100922/phys...th-simulation/

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In the release notes of the PhysX SDK 2.8.4.4, there is this line:

Performance

* Optimized cloth simulation on PS3, XBOX 360, PC CPU

The new PhysX SDK 2.8.4 comes with an optimized CPU cloth simulation path and is compiled with SSE2 option. Optimized CPU cloth simulation ? According to the test I did, this is true. The cloth sample shipped with PhysX SDK shows clearly the gain in performance. I tested on my dev system with a GTX 460 (R260.63) + Quad Core X 9650 @ 3.2GHz:

- PhysX 2.8.4: 443 FPS
- PhysX 2.8.3: 112 FPS

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almost 4x faster. this is some controversial stuff here. lots of conflicting data.

Not necessarily - it could have been rewritten, not simply recompiled. Unfortunately the people who actually know what's going on probably won't be interested in enlightening us.

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Originally Posted by Chumbucket843

almost 4x faster. this is some controversial stuff here. lots of conflicting data.

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Not really, even the blog entry suggests, that there are indeed scenarios, where we might see 2-4x faster results, but it's near impossible, that it will happen overall.

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Originally Posted by Vardant

Not really, even the blog entry suggests, that there are indeed scenarios, where we might see 2-4x faster results, but it's near impossible, that it will happen overall.

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the blog is a bunch of opinions that i disregard.

fact: the demo of the cloth is running 4x faster. obviously rendering is almost no overhead but i will counter his "overall" argument. if 4x faster physics is in fact possible, the over all framerate is not what matters. you can have 4x more physics interactions for free.

There's still a question, what is behind this speed bump, as trinibwoy pointed out. It could really be anything.

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Originally Posted by Vardant

You know, I have played Vampire Bloodlines on Source engine, it looks average, loading times are terrible and it's not optimized. I bought a new GPU, several times faster, DX11 and everything and nothing has changed. So the GPU wasn't the problem, Source engine just plain sucks.

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Maybe it's just THAT game that sucks. Dark Messiah is awesome physics wise and runs super fast. Guess what, it's Source powered...

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Originally Posted by SKYMTL

Interesting conversation.

I think a lot of people are equating poorly implemented PhysX (Batman, Cryostasis, etc) with the actual performance of it in ALL games. This just isn't the case and games like Dark Void (with the latest patch) and Mafia II illustrate this. Both of these games have absolutely no issue processing higher levels of PhysX on the CPU across multiple threads.

Yes, processing it on a dedicated GPU will yield a performance increase but in some cases processing it on the CPU SLIGHTLY BETTER PERFORMANCE due to RENDERING bottlenecks. Transferring the PhysX processing to the CPU can free up the GPU to get on with the task of rendering.

On a side note, I am a firm believer that physics processing has no business being done on the GPU when we have multi core CPUs usually sitting around doing nothing.

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Yep^

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Originally Posted by SKYMTL

Oh, I agree. However I also think that an effort should be made to max out the CPU before trying to validate a company's marketing practices which say using a GPU for high level physics is better.

The main problem with doing physics on the GPU is that you will ALWAYS loose rendering power in order to accomplish it unless you use a dedicated graphcis card. Personally, I want the ability to choose which to use but in may games (again: Batman, Cryostasis, etc) PhysX is so poorly implemented that the choice is effectively taken away from the user.

That isn't a proper way to sell a technology to consumers. Rather, show us that a CPU can do it WELL and then show how much BETTER a GPU can do it. I think this will actually help sell more GPUs because in many cases a $60 dedicated GPU will most likely benefit physics calculations much more than a $60 CPU upgrade.

At this point I think that the dedicated GPU setup for PhysX is the only way I would actually consider doing this. Loosing rendering power is perfectly fine if the game doesn't demand much but what about games like Mafia II and Metro 2033? Would I want to lower IQ settings just to ensure persistent debris, bouncing titties and somewhat realistic fabric? Heck no.

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Because nVidia wouldn't sell any video cards..

Understand, pseudo eye candy is important to kids.. thus, if physx wasn't artificially hindered on the CPU, then there would be no reason to up sell their video cards, as special olympic cards. Specially for those lost souls who think $87 quad cores aren't the norm...

You can build a 6-core gaming rig for $800 bucks. Your right, there is no reason for a stand alone physx card.

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Originally Posted by Xoulz

Because nVidia wouldn't sell any video cards..

Understand, pseudo eye candy is important to kids.. thus, if physx wasn't artificially hindered on the CPU, then there would be no reason to up sell their video cards, as special olympic cards. Specially for those lost souls who think $87 quad cores aren't the norm...

You can build a 6-core gaming rig for $800 bucks. Your right, there is no reason for a stand alone physx card.

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nvidia could sell more if it wasn't blocked when ati card are rending gpu.

Nvidia can sell cards just on the price/performance ratio, look at GTX460, besides power consumption thats an excellent value.
They really dont need TWIMTB ,or wooden cards, or douche jen hsung statements, or hindered physx performance, or cuda ,or blocking ati gpu physx with nvidia addon card...

They only need to make good cards ,and do a good driver support.Thats all.
Thats how they killed 3dfx.
If physx really was rewritten recently for multicore cpus, and i will see my 6 cores utilized ,than i may be getting GTX460, its much cheaper than HD5850 in my country.

But witl all those extras (Cuda, PhysX, 3D Vision, TWIMTBP), they can gain an edge over AMD in cases where the cards seem otherwise equal.

I'd say that there are far more people who prefer buying Nvidia than AMD in cases where the cards are the same in perf/price/power consumption. Nvidia is THE thing for gamers. Nvidia also works closely with developers and has wide array of support for developers via Nvidia Developer Zone.

AMD just makes products and wishes for the best.

See, this a shame all around. If Ageia had not been absorbed then we may very well have have CPU based Physx. Using one or two cores of a CPU for physics processing is still cheaper than a dedicated GPU. If you try GPU for rendering and Physx the performance hit is massive.

It is sad really.

I consider all this "Physics is the future of gaming!" buzz to be nonsense. One does not need physics to make a good game. It looks "nice" just as long until everyone is doing it.

Developers should aim to make their games fun, not realistic. Because a fun game will be played for longer period of time, gives more value for the money. Then again, if that is the case, companies can't just release sequels every year to cash the fans.

It's a shame that most of the crowd love dumbed down "realistic" games though. What new and innovative do the AAA-titles give to the players, apart from better graphics and "omg physx"? Storyline? Well, go read a book. :rolleyes:

i want better AI, i hate games where all you have to do is put the cursor where they will pop their head out, and its bye bye bad guy

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Originally Posted by Manicdan

i want better AI, i hate games where all you have to do is put the cursor where they will pop their head out, and its bye bye bad guy

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No, you want more challenging games. One can make game more challenging without necessarily improving the AI.

Take CoD4 for an example. What I hated the most was that the player was able to get hit at least 7 times, while it took 2-3 hits to take down an enemy. Why should the enemies be any weaker than the player? Why is this same thing happening over and over again in games, the player is some kind of a hero, superhuman who is matched by no other. What is the point in it? People want more realism as in better graphics, but they also love to escape the realism and act as if they were something greater than they really are.

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Originally Posted by SexyMF

See, this a shame all around. If Ageia had not been absorbed then we may very well have have CPU based Physx. Using one or two cores of a CPU for physics processing is still cheaper than a dedicated GPU. If you try GPU for rendering and Physx the performance hit is massive.

It is sad really.

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nice troll.

i fail to see how we don't have cpu physx, i mean if physx can't run on a cpu how can wii, xbox, and ps3 games feature the physx engine? physx on the gpu is a feature that nvidia has implemeted to reward thier customers. if you don't like it, turn it off. end of debate.

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Originally Posted by Calmatory

No, you want more challenging games. One can make game more challenging without necessarily improving the AI.

Take CoD4 for an example. What I hated the most was that the player was able to get hit at least 7 times, while it took 2-3 hits to take down an enemy. Why should the enemies be any weaker than the player? Why is this same thing happening over and over again in games, the player is some kind of a hero, superhuman who is matched by no other. What is the point in it? People want more realism as in better graphics, but they also love to escape the realism and act as if they were something greater than they really are.

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Yeah but I'd rather have better AI than less HP in comparison to the AI. I think it's stupid in games where every enemy has twice your HP but the IQ of a retarded lap dog.

When you look closely Crysis, that suit in real life would be incredible, but instead they balanced it out to keep the game challenging which in turn makes the suit almost purely for show. Stealth that fails if you move and strength that gets you killed before you reach the target. You spend like 90% of the time just playing it like Halo because armour mode is the only useful mode. Every time you try to get clever, later on in the game, it shoots you in the arse.