Analysis: PhysX On Systems With AMD Graphics Cards

[Ha-So]

You should check out LOTRO or DDO, both games have started to use physics through DX11 directcompute extensions. It's not OpenCL, but at least it's an M$ "open" standard which everyone can use. I believe AMD helped the developer implement Water physics which is usable to both ATI/AMD & nvidia cards. It's also independent of game engine used, and a first step in the right direction.

Kudos to AMD & Turbine for the platform independent effort!

 

[nebun]

this shows how much better nvida is compared to ati...wait ati is not spending much money on their havok engine...they probably forgot that they even have it.

 

[Guest]

Well at least the code is not 6 years old so it runs smoothly. /sarc

Wonder how many more devs they have to bribe to make people stop supporting their open thievery and stop buying their (bad and really bad) cards >.

 

[x3style]

[citation][nom]varfantomen[/nom]Heh why should nvidia spend their time and money to help AMD? It's as much nonsense as saying Toyota should help Ford be cause that too would be for the greater good. Yeah damn those scumbags at Toyota![/citation]
Not helping them is one thing but activley sabotaging everyone including the customers is a totaly different thing.

 

[Blink]

Well, at I will have a use for my old 8800 GTS 512 later.

 

[gnesterenko]

Agreed with others here. Will not be giving nVidia a dime of my money until they change their tune, no matter what performance their cards may churn out. If I do decide to drop the $100 for PhysX support, I'm getting the card on the secondary market (eBay). This is ridiculus. I wish more news sites other then the heavy tech ones (such as toms or /.) would call them out on it in public.

"The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."

 

[sincreator]

First off, great article. Really good read, but a few more Physx games/synthetics would of really shown that this works in more than one situation/game.

Here's a kinda old article that shows the same type of testing, but with a few other Physx titles. Batman and Cryostasis really stand out in this article when a HD5870 gets paired with an GTX 275 for dedicated physx.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/radeon-hd5800-crossfirex_8.html#sect3 The ATI + Nvidia combination is in blue.

PS: I know this is an older article that came out before the 400 series Nvidia cards were released, but I figured atleast people could see what type of effect the pairing of ATI and Nvidia together make in a few other Physx games.

 

[Guest]

The conclusion regarding SSE2 is wrong. Using SSE2 optimizations does not simply involve turning on a compiler switch. You need to design your data, API and code around it, preferably writing assembly or intrinsics. SSE2 (and 3, and 4) can parallelize calculations (treating 4 data at a time) and vectorize operations (processing a large quantity of data much faster that normally because each piece of data travels in sync in the processor pipeline). These kind of SSE2 optimization can deliver 2-4x better perfomances on data throughput alone, but more can be achieved because you have better control on caching, operation ordering, etc.

 

[marraco]

It would be better if nVidia were running PhysX both in CPPU and GPU simultaneously. That way, a GPU would increase performance despite CPU being ok.

 

[zybch]

[citation][nom]jamesedgeuk2000[/nom]What about people with dedicated PPU's? I have 8800 GTX SLi and an Ageia Physx card where do I come into it?[/citation]

The old dedicated PPUs from physX before nVidia bought them, are simply too underpowered to provide any sort of benefits. In fact they are even worse then the 8400 mentioned in the article that will actually slow down physX stuff if added as a dedicated PPU card.

 

[kelemvor4]

Has AMD even tried to license PhysX from AMD? Not sure why everyone is crying foul of nVidia here. Perhaps you should be looking the other direction unless you are saying AMD needs the handout?

 

[hannibal]

I allso agree that Nvidia don't have to help AMD, but it's funny that I would like to buy Nvidia card for PhysX, but it would be useless, because I am going to use AMD as my main graphic card... So Nvidia is loosing money because it does not allow other graphic cards in the system... So they are loosing actually. Ofcource they can/could forse me to pure Nvia platform and earn a little bit more, but I don't like pushing. Even Nvidia now have some very good graphic cards 460 and 580, the situation has not/is not so good all the time and I want to be free to chose the best bang for the buck. At this moment pure Nvia solution is very competive indeed! But how obout in future? I would go to pure Nvidia solution, they make some mistake in planning, have a bad luck (what ever) and suddently AMD would offer better GPU power. I would have to leave PhysX support again?

IMHO Nvidia have a right of making PhysX purely compatible to Nvidia cards. That is just fine (they develop it, and pay the bills!), but making it so that you can not have competitive graphic cards in you system at the same time... Well that is a little bit different story.
I am more than ready to buy 460 as an second GPU/PHYS card... but not in these terms.

 

[zybch]

I currently use a Radeon 9870 (dual GPUs on one board) and nothing nvidia has comes close to the performance of this card unless I spend up big and go SLi.
There is NO WAY I'm going to replace my card with a much slower performing nvidia one, and their stupid dumb 'can only use physx capability of our cards if NO radeon is present' mentality is freaking pathetic and petty.

 

[deanjo]

lol, can't help laugh at all this griping. If you guys wanna gripe then gripe to the game developers for not choosing a physics solution like Bullet Physics which can be used on all brands of GPUs.

And BTW for those people crying about AMD not using Havok on the GPU yet, Intel killed that baby before Nvidia had Physx, had intel not done that it would be very likely that you would see a crossvender solution. Havoc was demonstrated on GPU using both Nvidia and ATI way back in 2006.

 

[tom thumb]

Why should I be bothered to buy a hot, loud and power-wasting separate physics card, when I have several i7 cores at my disposal? A 6870 is enough for any game at 1920x1200. If enabling physX makes it unplayable, then that is simply a fault of the game.

 

[wolfram23]

Interesting article. I'm going to run the PhysX benchmark from Mafia 2 (if I can find it, I thought there was only a normal one) and see if my pair of 5850s and a single GT 240 on a PCIe 4x 1.1 lane performs better than what is posted... my FPS in Mafia 2 was pretty steady at 60 except for one scene with a massive explosion so... yeah.

 

[jabliese]

And how does AMD's physics solution compare? Oh, wait....

 

[blackened144]

[citation][nom]gti88[/nom]Only 1 out of 100 gamers may have a dedicated "phisix" card.Other 99 don't bother at all and avoid phisix to get smoother gameplay.Is it really worth it in eyes of Jen-Hsung?[/citation]
But millions of people already own a PhysX capable card and can still use it as a dedicated PhysX card once they upgrade.. Ive got an 8800GT that I might keep in the loop for PhysX when I eventually upgrade..

 

[Mousemonkey]

Has AMD even tried to license PhysX from AMD? Not sure why everyone is crying foul of nVidia here. Perhaps you should be looking the other direction unless you are saying AMD needs the handout?

It's highly unlikely that ATi/AMD would ever even seek a licence, they've said as much in the past and I don't think anything has changed since then.

 

[Guest]

Lol; "This configuration fares well by modern gaming standards and should stay suitable for heavy 3D gaming into the near future."

Huge CPU fan... 16 GB RAM... 6 core processor OC at 4.0 GHZ... I wish my configuration fared well!

 

[ph0b0s123]

"When comparing early VGA games with today's popular titles, it’s amazing how far we’ve come in 20 to 25 years."

Reading this made me feel really old. It has not been 25 year since I got the first comercially avaliable 256 color vga game can it, I thought. It was Star Trek V - Final Frontier btw.

Actually I got it for XMas 1990 at age 14. The standard came out in 1987 but no games used it until 1990. Had to put up with 16 color EGA games until then.

I know a nerdy point, but at least I feel a little less old now I can remember the dates.

 

[fausto]

[citation][nom]TKolb13[/nom]is it possible to run 2 5870's in crossfire and a gtx 260 all at once? (I upgraded to the crossfire)[/citation]


yes, Kyle at HardOCP has a similar setup but with gtx 580's.

 

[sohaib_96]

lol i got a gts 250 as a graphic card should i get another for physx????

 

[deanjo]

[citation][nom]mousemonkey[/nom]It's highly unlikely that ATi/AMD would ever even seek a licence, they've said as much in the past and I don't think anything has changed since then.[/citation]

Then really the people should be complaining to AMD shouldn't they?

 

[fausto]

i used to own an 8800gts512 and while physx looks great it is nothing but hype right now based on nvidia's handling of it. it doesn't factor into my purchase decisions.