Ran the game last night for a good few hours, maybe 5 or 6, with Physx enabled (on second older 285gtx card) and I dunno what's been done but the game with it enabled was much more stable than it has been. Huge battles too, everything on Ultra apart from shadows and AO which were both turned off. Was very enjoyable with the Physx on, explosions were nuts, made me stay around to watch generators until they blew up lol
Waaait. Isn't PhysX notoriously unfriendly to CPUs? As in it isn't multi-threaded at all? Is this physics engine one of the big reasons why this game's performance is so CPU-bound? Forgive my ignorance if this is not the case.
Almost certainly this is one of the problems. You'll never get an admission out of SOE though, Nvidia will have put too much cash in to let them muddy the fizzx name.
Replies seem to get messed a little. Sorry Are you sure those are actually using GPU acceleration? Better check your sources. It was mentioned by Erwin Coumans many times, that full-scale OpenCL will be included only in upcoming Bullet 3.x version, while current OpenCL rigid body code is "separate and not integrated in the regular/CPU Bullet version" http://www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=7999 and cloth " OpenCL acceleration is very limited and still experimental" http://www.bulletphysics.org/Bullet/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=7977 That is indeed "plenty". Also, I'm not sure what is left of Bullet, if any, in newer Rockstar games. They have said they are using "proprietary physics engine" in one of the MP3 trailers. I've heard that like a two years ago. Guess what happened? To put long story short 1) Not all GPU effects have CPU backend, for example, turbulence grid is GPU only (those swirly paticles) 2) For a CPU limited game, it may be not a good idea to put more load on CPU just to calculate cosmetic stuff 3) NVIDIA has implemeted the effects, mostly. Not AMD, not Intel. It is up them to choose how/where to run them. You just mixed it all up in a very weird way.
some people argue the opposite. since it is multithreaded and friendly to cpu's, you can sometimes get away with enabling all the physx effects without even having an nvidia card when you have a fast cpu.
Yes. But like PhysX, many things are done only on the CPU. Only soft body, fluids, cloth and particle physics make sense on a GPU. If this is still a PhysX vs Bullet in games debate then GPU regid bodies are irrelivent for 2 reasons. Firstly while PhysX supports it, using it means the game will simply not run on anything but nV since the core/gameplay physics rely on it. Secondly, regid body physics is well suited for CPU's. Every game worth mentioning does it on the CPU, PhysX or not. Also, those links are a year old. Instead of doing Google-foo have a look at the source to see what is there and what is not: http://code.google.com/p/bullet/source/browse/#svn/trunk Like I said, many games already use it. I named 3 games using an engine which does it nicely and use it as a base for other stuff (the propitiatory physics engine you talk about for example, it's what makes people fall over in a believable way when hit by a car for example, it's build ON TOP of Bullet) and make it easy for the player to experience it (driving a car in a crowd of people for example).
Yes, let us not forget what we are "fighting" for in a heat of a battle, right ? The initial debate, I believe, was about Bullet having/not-having a production-ready GPU acceleration (now or back in 2009) and if it was worth using it instead of PhysX SDK in PS2. No offence, but this is not an answer. Such statement requires a confirmation. For example, there is no mentions about OpenCL physics support in Cinema 4D since R12 release (first one with Bullet integration), same goes for Blender, 3DMark 2011/Next uses Bullet only for CPU physics tests. Absolutely. That is why Bullet devs spend so much time on building OpenCL rigid body solver Ehm.. even PhysX does not support GPU acceleration for real gameplay rigid body physics You mean Euphoria ? It's not a physics engine. It's AI and behavioral animation solution. It was used in conjunction with Havok in latest Star Wars: Force Unleashed games and with PhysX in Backbreaker, for example. As for MP3 trailer I was talking about, here it is (at 1:20) "motion capture animation, Rockstar's proprietary physics engine and Natural Motion's Euphoria character behaviors" Which leads to initial question - what is left of Bullet in RAGE engine (since only "some parts of Bullet" were integrated in the first place) and is it free to project its usage to a games like GTA5.
