Mafia II's strangely high suggested "Apex" (PhysX) recommended requirements

[JimmiG]

All us nvidia owners that soak up all that physickie goodness. We like AA too on SC.

Actually I went from a 4850 to a GTX460 and I don't really care about PhysX. It seems a bit stupid to overload the GPU with more tasks when most games are GPU-bound already.

I don't want to buy a second card for physics either. I don't need more "cores" when I've got between 1 and 2.5 cores of my Quad core CPU just sitting idle while I'm playing games. Better multi-threaded physics would be more efficient. Instead, Nvidia intentionally broke multi-threaded PhysX to make it slower on CPUs.

 

[edplayer]

I thought the effects added to Batman and Mirror's Edge added immersion.

I haven't played Batman but I heard that he kicks around a bunch of papers.


Is he messing up the bad guy's files so when they come back on Monday morning, they have to spend time organizing the office?

 

[happy medium]

I've watched many video of physx and so far Mafia 2 was great and Darkest days was fairly decent. The rest? meh.

 

[toyota]

I haven't played Batman but I heard that he kicks around a bunch of papers.


Is he messing up the bad guy's files so when they come back on Monday morning, they have to spend time organizing the office?

I played with and without physx and without it you wont be missing much. yeah papers move around and the fog, smoke and cobwebs are more interactive but that's it. the game was delayed because they actually removed a lot of the physx features before release.

you do need to play that game though as its one of best games made in a while.

 

[edplayer]

I've watched many video of physx and so far Mafia 2 was great and Darkest days was fairly decent. The rest? meh.

do the videos of Mafia 2 show with/without PhysX?

I remember seeing at least one video and I recall a lot of broken glass and cars blowing up. Broken glass seems OK but nothing to get excited over. I've seen cars blow up in lots of games so I'm sure it would happen without PhysX also. If they were not to blow up with ATi cards, that would be just more reasons for people to dislike Nvidia, paying to have games intentionally crippled of a feature that it could have easily done with an ATi card.


Maybe there is someone explaining how those effects look/work a lot better using PhysX (in the Mafia 2 game). From what I've seen, there is nothing even close to "great" about it...

 

[stag3]

Looks like steam users have some tiny monitors. Anyone who frequently games will be using a 24"+ monitor. So 1920x1080 or 1900x1200 is standard now. And if you don't game at your monitors native resolution, you're doing it wrong.

Back to the topic, I feel the game requirements are a little stretched. But this won't stop me from playing it.

same here, all of my friend are on 24 or higher
and most of my co workers are on 22's or higher

 

[Insomniator]

I can't believe that video of Mafia is supposed to be a great example of why physx is so great.

What the hell is the (functional) difference between having a second GPU calculate how particles should fly off a wall and just making a damn generic animation for it that doesn't take nearly as much power? Also how long have windows been breakable in games?! I thought there were ps2 games that did it.

That video is a joke if the best they can do is make debris fly off of everything you shoot. Floating barrels in HL2 is STILL the best use of phyics yet and I'm pretty sure my Pentium 4 ran that game.

 

[MrK6]

Well said edplayer and Insomniator, I agree.

 

[Ashkael]

Whether or not you are a Physx supporter, I think the argument here is that specifically asking for $600 worth of brand A video cards just to meet the recommended specifications for the best visual experience is going a bit too far.

It's been argued by its supporters that Physx is an "added value" that NVidia offers to their customers for "free". Yet when the first game that makes meaningful use of Physx rolls around, it turns out you need to have a dedicated Physx card in order to get the best experience. And while some people might have older cards lying around from the 200 series when they upgraded to a 400 series, not everyone has the cash to just throw at their machines to make one specific game run smoothly.