History of PhysX

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Carfax83

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Nov 1, 2010
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From one of the people that actually had a big hand in writing the code for PhysX, Pierre Terdiman.

The history of PhysX

I came across his blog whilst searching for stuff on the internet, and I was surprised to see him quote a thread that I started on Anandtech last year in October.

Here is the thread.

Apparently, Mr. Terdiman was kind of ticked off at some of the unfair criticisms in that thread leveled towards PhysX, especially PhysX 2.xx and he set the record straight in his blog in a very detailed manner.

He clarifies why PhysX 2.xx never had SIMD support, and why merely running it through a compiler with the SSEn flag ticked would not have been worth it at the time.

It's an interesting summary for those that are curious about such things.. Anyway, it just reinforces what I said in that thread in October. The new focus now for NVidia is on software physics, and PhysX 3.xx is a huge upgrade over 2.xx in terms of speed and features.
 
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tential

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May 13, 2008
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Why didn't they keep hardware physics around and let it work with AMD cards?
Seems like a way to ensure mass adoption...

No matter what would happen, they would always have at least 1 card in a system.
 
C

Carfax83

Diamond Member
Nov 1, 2010
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tential said:
Why didn't they keep hardware physics around and let it work with AMD cards?
Seems like a way to ensure mass adoption...
Click to expand...

AMD did not want to license it. Instead, they invested in their own physics middleware software called Bullet physics which is open source, and apparently is a bit of a flop and not used very often by developers.

As for GPU physics, it has it's uses. For computationally intensive physics like fluid simulation, turbulence etcetera GPU physics is going to be much faster than software physics.

But software physics has come a LONG way over the years. The software physics they have now runs extremely fast on the CPU, and as a result we now have advanced physics effects in games that just a few years ago would not have been able to run in software without bogging down the rest of the game.

The PhysX in Metro Last Light Redux is the most impressive software physics I've ever seen in a game. Lots of cloth, fog, smoke, destruction and debris effects in that game, and they all run really fast on the CPU..

The PhysX in Metro Last Light Redux is superior to the physics in the latest titles that use Havok like DAI and AC Unity in my opinion..
 
ShintaiDK

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
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tential said:
Why didn't they keep hardware physics around and let it work with AMD cards?
Seems like a way to ensure mass adoption...

No matter what would happen, they would always have at least 1 card in a system.
Click to expand...

As in a seperate card? That would sell as much as discrete sound cards.
 
C

Creig

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Carfax83 said:
AMD did not want to license it. Instead, they invested in their own physics middleware software called Bullet physics which is open source, and apparently is a bit of a flop and not used very often by developers.
Click to expand...
Don't forget that Nvidia deliberately disabled hardware PhysX when an AMD card was the primary renderer. Hardware PhysX was perfectly functional on an Nvidia card with an AMD card as the primary video card as proven by the modding community (and once by Nvidia themselves when they forgot to include a Vendor ID lockout in their PhysX driver).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3744/...terogeneous-gpu-physx-its-a-bug-not-a-feature


But in typical Nvidia fashion, they immediately locked it back down. They called the missing Vendor ID lockout a "bug". LOL! Even the Aegia PPUs people had purchased were prevented from working when an AMD card was present in the system. Nvidia worked very hard to ensure that hardware PhysX would not become very widely adopted.
 
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FiendishMind

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Aug 9, 2013
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Creig said:
Don't forget that Nvidia deliberately disabled hardware PhysX when an AMD card was the primary renderer. Hardware PhysX was perfectly functional on an Nvidia card with an AMD card as the primary video card as proven by the modding community (and once by Nvidia themselves when they forgot to include a Vendor ID lockout in their PhysX driver).

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3744/...terogeneous-gpu-physx-its-a-bug-not-a-feature


But in typical Nvidia fashion, they immediately locked it back down. They called the missing Vendor ID lockout a "bug". LOL! Even the Aegia PPUs people had purchased were prevented from working when an AMD card was present in the system. Nvidia worked very hard to ensure that hardware PhysX would not become very widely adopted.
Click to expand...

Since we are delving into the history anyways, Nvidia was fully supporting Eran Badit's third party effort to port PhysX to Radeons.

http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/38283-nvidia-supports-physx-effort-on-ati-radeon

It was AMD who ended up nixing the whole deal by failing to provide the necessary support.

This of course doesn't excuse Nvidia locking up PhysX later but still, we could of had PhysX on Radeons from nearly the beginning had AMD played ball.
 
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C

Creig

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Oct 9, 1999
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AFAIK, there was no "support" necessary other than the removal of the Vendor ID lockout.

http://www.ngohq.com/news/17916-nvidia-driver-bug-removes-hybrid-physx-blockage-updated.html
Nvidia's Tom Petersen has commented on our article through the nTersect blog: "A lot of you have been asking about PhysX and the 257.15 beta driver we posted on Monday. First off it is true that PhysX is enabled when running on NVIDIA GPUs when AMD GPUs are used in the same system. PhysX is a compelling technology that makes PC games great – I am not surprised our fans are eager for it. When using this beta driver no additional hacks are required to enable PhysX. While it was not intentional, due to the overwhelming positive response to the beta driver we have decided to leave the beta up with support enabled.
Click to expand...
While there may have been issues with some games (although I don't remember hearing about any), they could have at least let people try it for themselves and see. If it worked, great. If it didn't, Nvidia would have been under no compulsion to make any changes for systems that had an AMD video card. But instead, they locked it down totally. Even those people who had purchased Ageia PPU cards were screwed over by the lockout.
 
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sm625

sm625

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May 6, 2011
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Carfax83 said:
But software physics has come a LONG way over the years. The software physics they have now runs extremely fast on the CPU, and as a result we now have advanced physics effects in games that just a few years ago would not have been able to run in software without bogging down the rest of the game.

The PhysX in Metro Last Light Redux is the most impressive software physics I've ever seen in a game. Lots of cloth, fog, smoke, destruction and debris effects in that game, and they all run really fast on the CPU..

The PhysX in Metro Last Light Redux is superior to the physics in the latest titles that use Havok like DAI and AC Unity in my opinion..
Click to expand...

Is this terminology correct? Are you talking about PhysX or software physics in Metro Last Light Redux?
 
MrK6

MrK6

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Aug 9, 2004
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Big surprise that someone gets upset when their work is called rubbish; unfortunately, it is. Hardware PhysX has been a complete joke since the beginning, even under Aegia. It's been mentioned time and time again, but the concept of putting further load on GPUs, which are the performance bottleneck in almost every gaming situation, is flawed fundamentally. Top that off with shoddy implementation, cheeky marketing, and overly anticompetitive practices and it's no surprise it hasn't gone anywhere even a decade later.
 
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FiendishMind

Member
Aug 9, 2013
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Creig said:
AFAIK, there was no "support" necessary other than the removal of the Vendor ID lockout.

http://www.ngohq.com/news/17916-nvidia-driver-bug-removes-hybrid-physx-blockage-updated.html
While there may have been issues with some games (although I don't remember hearing about any), they could have at least let people try it for themselves and see. If it worked, great. If it didn't, Nvidia would have been under no compulsion to make any changes for systems that had an AMD video card. But instead, they locked it down totally. Even those people who had purchased Ageia PPU cards were screwed over by the lockout.
Click to expand...

The lockout didn't come until quite a bit later, check the dates.
 
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DeathReborn

DeathReborn

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Oct 11, 2005
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MrK6 said:
Big surprise that someone gets upset when their work is called rubbish; unfortunately, it is. Hardware PhysX has been a complete joke since the beginning, even under Aegia. It's been mentioned time and time again, but the concept of putting further load on GPUs, which are the performance bottleneck in almost every gaming situation, is flawed fundamentally. Top that off with shoddy implementation, cheeky marketing, and overly anticompetitive practices and it's no surprise it hasn't gone anywhere even a decade later.
Click to expand...

What's more of a joke, PhysX or Bullet? Did you expect it to become Skynet or something?

Physics procesing can only go so far when the various companies avoid working together. As has been said AMD nixxed it going to Radeon & Intel pretty much ended large scale adoption HW Physics when they cancelled Havok HW Physics development.

HW PhysX could work in situations where there is hardware not being used by rendering a game or via dedicated silicon. With the rumours of ARM being on future Nvidia GPU's that would once again open up the option of HW being available for PhysX use.
 
chimaxi83

chimaxi83

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May 18, 2003
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It's too bad that since the beginning, the coolest things about PhysX are feature demos and marketing videos.
 
SirPauly

SirPauly

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