Current state of PhysX? Is it well and truly dead?

PhysX heyday was Arkham City...that had some really amazing particle effects- the Penguin fight at the Iceberg Lounge looked gorgeous
I remember the tech demo of batman walking through a low-lying cloud of fog or something and the fog wooshed around his feet like what you'd think real smoke/fog would do should you walk through it.
 
I often wonder if it makes sense to make an add-on ray tracing card like the old PhysX cards.
 
It’s a shame that ray tracing can’t use a 2nd GPU just for ray tracing and let the first card do the rasterization. That was the idea back in the day with a dedicated PPU.
 
It’s a shame that ray tracing can’t use a 2nd GPU just for ray tracing and let the first card do the rasterization. That was the idea back in the day with a dedicated PPU.
I thought the hardware to do the RT is separate from rasterization cores? If so, why would you need that on a second card?
 
Gone are these days, nvidia killed sli, amd the same.
I used another gpu just for physics in a mafia game.
Physics is the same invention of hot water by nvidia.
We will see how long this dlss will last as well as ray tracing.
Intel, amd and nvidia are not competitors although here in Europe everyone thinks they are and then they insult each other and measure which has a bigger one.
 
DLSS will probably not last unless Nvidia opens it up (which won't happen) but ray tracing has industry support so will probably be here to stay.
 
Metro 2033 was the first (and last?) game that ive played that used physx, I remember putting my old GTX 275 in the machine, clicking the checkbox for physX, and then spending hours staring at banners/flags/hair trying to determine if enabling physx actually made a difference or not.......I still dont know if it did
 
It’s a shame that ray tracing can’t use a 2nd GPU just for ray tracing and let the first card do the rasterization. That was the idea back in the day with a dedicated PPU.
I think the sli bridge bandwidth would have to be way higher to facilitate ray tracing on another gpu
 
I think the sli bridge bandwidth would have to be way higher to facilitate ray tracing on another gpu
It would have to be around 300x higher to ensure no additional latency is introduced, and that is only for 60 FPS on an 11GB video card.
 
I just recently played through Darkest of Days and the Physx were neat, they under utilized them a bit though.
Cryostasis on the other hand, with the water and ice, it was really cool. More games need to use physx.
I also loved the original metro 2033’s use of physx for their smoke effects, it really added to the immersion of walking through old dilapidated subway tunnels and the smokiness of the homemade gun powder they use in their ammo.
 
Nothing to necro considering PhysX is still in wide use. It's built into UE4 and Unity, for two.

That generally was using the software version of the engine, no one really enabled or used the hardware side. The hardware accelerated version is very much dead at this point. With nothing released in almost 8yrs with the tech I think?
 
That generally was using the software version of the engine, no one really enabled or used the hardware side. The hardware accelerated version is very much dead at this point. With nothing released in almost 8yrs with the tech I think?
It's kinda been superceded by nVIDIA Gameworks - which - I haven't really seen much use of outside of a few titles... a while ago...Based upon their pricing themselves out of all but those with the most disposable income, I wager nVIDIA is looking to move out of PC gaming and on to the big bucks, namely, the Pro market, AI/machine learning, and Enterprise.

Their GeForce RTX GPUs this gen are much closer to professional pricing compared to GeForce and Quadro cards of the past. The cryptocraze showed Jen Hsun Huang what his company's GPUs would sell for, now he wants that fourthyacht money...

AMD isn't helping with their 7900 XT pricing. That should have been a $729 GPU at most...
 
nvidia necroing physx

PhysX has been open source for a long time....It went open source back in 2015 with version 3, they changed the license type for version 4 in 2018, and version 5 was supposed to come out in 2021 but Nvidia claims it was delayed because of COVID, and that's an argument that is very hard to refute so, not going to try.
PhysX never went away, but for FPS titles Havok does better, Bullet is easier to implement even if it is not as accurate, and PhysX is mostly for really nice-looking static elements so very pretty things that most developers don't want to spend the resources on at this stage. There are cheaper methods to get something that looks similar, especially with how textures, 3d models, and lighting have advanced over the past 8 years.
For actual workloads involving complex calculations, CUDA has much faster libraries, and PhysX 5 was too late to the party for Epic who developed their own lightweight engine for UE5, leaving just Unity integrating it by default.
You can manually add PhysX 5 to Unreal 5 though, it just falls outside the support range.
Epic has instead moved over to specific engines for specific physical effects that better interact with how they do things in the UE5 engine.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/physics-in-unreal-engine/
 
PhysX has been open source for a long time....It went open source back in 2015 with version 3, they changed the license type for version 4 in 2018, and version 5 was supposed to come out in 2021 but Nvidia claims it was delayed because of COVID, and that's an argument that is very hard to refute so, not going to try.
PhysX never went away, but for FPS titles Havok does better, Bullet is easier to implement even if it is not as accurate, and PhysX is mostly for really nice-looking static elements so very pretty things that most developers don't want to spend the resources on at this stage. There are cheaper methods to get something that looks similar, especially with how textures, 3d models, and lighting have advanced over the past 8 years.
For actual workloads involving complex calculations, CUDA has much faster libraries, and PhysX 5 was too late to the party for Epic who developed their own lightweight engine for UE5, leaving just Unity integrating it by default.
You can manually add PhysX 5 to Unreal 5 though, it just falls outside the support range.
Epic has instead moved over to specific engines for specific physical effects that better interact with how they do things in the UE5 engine.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.1/en-US/physics-in-unreal-engine/
cool story bro
that post was in Nov and someone else already made that point and i was kinda joking.
 
That generally was using the software version of the engine, no one really enabled or used the hardware side. The hardware accelerated version is very much dead at this point. With nothing released in almost 8yrs with the tech I think?
The "hardware" version has long since been superseded by a series of CUDA libraries, that are very fast and accurate.
 
You know, I was playing Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition recently, and I saw an "Advanced PhysX" toggle in the options menu. I was surprised. It has been a looooooooooooooong time since I have seen an option for PhysX in the settings menu for a game.

I remember playing around with the nVidia Flex demo and messing with the PhysX stuff in there. That was neat.
 
You know, I was playing Metro Exodus: Enhanced Edition recently, and I saw an "Advanced PhysX" toggle in the options menu. I was surprised. It has been a looooooooooooooong time since I have seen an option for PhysX in the settings menu for a game.

I remember playing around with the nVidia Flex demo and messing with the PhysX stuff in there. That was neat.
It's built into the game engine nowadays, so there is no need for an option to turn it on.
 
Latest Nvidia GRD 555.85 updated the PhysX system to 9.23.1019. Not sure what it addresses. Found it interesting.

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Release Highlights​

  • This version of the PhysX System Software provides Security updates for some included DLLs and the installer.
  • Updates the digital signature of the installed DLLs.
  • Includes the latest PhysX runtime builds to support all released PhysX content.
  • Supports NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on all GeForce 9‑series GPUs and later with a minimum of 256MB dedicated graphics memory.
    Note: Some applications may have higher minimum requirements.
  • Supports NVIDIA PhysX acceleration on GeForce for SDK versions 2.7.1, 2.7.3, 2.7.4, 2.7.5, 2.7.6, 2.8.0, 2.8.1, 2.8.3, 2.8.4, and above.
  • Supports control of your GPU PhysX configuration from the NVIDIA display driver control panel.
  • Note: For games that use SDK versions before 2.7.1 the PhysX Legacy Installer must also be installed. These are games that were released around the end of 2007 or earlier. (AGEIA titles) Examples of these games include Cell Factor, Clive baker’s Jericho, Gears of War, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Switch Ball and Velvet Assassin. The PhysX Legacy Installer is available here: PhysX_System_Software_Legacy_Driver.
 
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