NVIDIA offers PhysX and CUDA support to GeForce 8 and higher

It's been around for about 2 years now. I'm sure if it was the next big thing in gaming it would have received more attention prior to the implementation of it in the NVIDIA cards.

There is an interesting interview with John Carmack on the internets where he talks about why it won't be a big thing. Basically (according to him, I'd hope he'd know) when designing a game, you have to design the game for the lowest common denominator (the person with the least powerful system). If your engine is built with PhysX, and, say, the game calls for you to destroy a building that is built using PhysX, and most of your market doesn't have PhysX, it's going to be a lag fest. Because of this, the only implementation for PhysX right now is for eye candy such as special UT3 maps with destructable walls, and tech demo's with water flowing realistically.

I somewhat agree with him that next gen (or even next-next gen) physics will start to play a big roll in games, especially on consoles where the hardware is set across the entire platform (and thus you don't have to build for the lowest denominator).

For my money, PhysX is something that isn't really going anywhere any time soon. That is why I went for the 4870 this time around, instead of the similarly priced (yet slightly under performing) GTX 260 with PhysX support. On the up side, Cuda is supposedly amazing for Folding@Home, and there can be no down side to that.

Seeing as PhysX support is now a feature in all forthcoming Nvidia cards and they are allowing AMD to support it as well, I can see it being implemented more. But for a while it will all be gimmickey features that don't effect gameplay at all and come with a toggle.

I know physx has been around for a long time now, but it was only available as an expensive add-on. Nobody bought it so of course it hasnt had any success yet. The video card implementation brings physx to the mass market for free, which is why I hope its not just a gimmick that doesnt work well enough to be of any use. It will be interesting to see if this takes off and has a big effect on game performance now that almost everyone will be able to use physx.

BananaBoat,

While that is certainly true for the mass market games, there are some games that come out for the higher end that could greatly benefit from this. Crysis, for example, was certainly not designed for the "lowest common denominator" group and it has already surpassed 1.5 million copies sold (according to its page on wikipedia). Going forward if all cards that are being sold are capable of using PhysX then I can see many more games being developed to take advantage of it.

John Carmack's assertion held good in a world where PhysX processing was done by a seperate card. Now when you're getting PhysX acceleration "for free" with your existing hardware, why won't PhysX be relevant?

I recall some years ago a company called 3dfx said that Nvidia's GPU concept was a gimmick and no developer would bother writing code for one.

Yea, Physics is such a gimmick. Even in real life... /sarcasm

The numbers (specifically, the ones Valve released, as taken from steam info gathering) show that most people are playing on hardware that you and I would probably consider dated. So to reach that player base, you've got to design a game that scales down extremely well. That doesn't mean it can't scale up to have extremely beautiful graphics etc, but it does mean that the foundations of the map need to be scaled down (and then they build on top of it). The building example I mentioned is the best one I can think of, where you'd need to build a completely different level for people that don't have PhysX (because their non-PhysX enabled card can't possibly run the physics calculations) and for people that do.

I don't doubt that it will eventually be just another standard in game design, but until that large share of people with terrible systems have upgraded, it just doesn't seem that profitable. While Crysis will run on low at a low res on alot of computers, any game with PhsyX built into the engine would require for a person to have PhysX for it to run. You'd be chopping your sales in the leg. It's kind of like how Hardware Transform and Lighting was back in the day...I remember being forced to buy a 3D card because games suddenly started requiring HW T&L before they'd run. Boy was I pissed...and requiring PhysX would be exactly like that.

Actually Banana Boat it showed that the most common card was the 8800GT, which supports PhysX...

Try this : http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

Yeah, it's pathetic how seldom laptop vendors release updated graphics drivers. Using the drivers from laptopvideo2go.com increased my friend's 3DMark score by about 500 points.

Oops, I was thinking of GPGPU.

CUDA has still been out for a good while though.

I also have this card (640mb version, I might add) and don't really get this either.

If people report back good things about it, I'll download and see.

short answer... yes

But it will take away from the overall graphics power of the card. like turning on anti-aliasing it makes things look prettier but you'll take a hit in frame rate.

At the very least it's worth it to download and see what it looks like. Some of the older games aren't really pushing the modern geforce cards anyway. city of heroes/villains comes to mind.

Ok. There's this thing called an FPGA. GPUs and PPUs are both essentially FPGAs, so a PPU is essentially a GPU in that it handles floating point math easily and is massively parallel. Porting PhysX to the GPU with CUDA is exactly what NVIDIA did.

Evidently sir, you and I have different definitions of the word "hilarious."