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Nvidia PhysX 5.0

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Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#61

Post by jokethrowaway »

dagmx wrote: post #29
evnix wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago. I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.

I think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect. There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head. Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism. One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry vid…

character motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better

the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#62

Post by gowings97 »

91edec wrote: post #44
gowings97 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason is money - it costs money (artists) to make destructible objects and art down for every conceivable way it can be broken/destroyed/manipulated. I hope/pray for a Battlefield 7 game that actually takes this seriously, but EA has run Battlefield into the ground.

Some ex-Dice guys are at Embark Studios and their next game seems to be bringing back destructible environments. Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYYiP2cKHKs https://www.embark-studios.com/

Very cool, thanks for sharing

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#63

Post by m000z0rz »

airstrike wrote: post #53
yboris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teardown - hands down one of the most innovative games in the last several years. It uses voxels and the game premise is destroying the environment to create an escape route once you trigger the alarm (by stealing required objects). https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

Looking at a gameplay video on YT ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--c8rjcSDs ), I didn't come away with the same impression as you described, or at least it doesn't really answer the parent's question. Sure, it is "fully destructible" but everything kinda breaks the same way because it's all voxels, and things like driving a seemingly indestructible truck through multiple walls doesn't feel particularly realistic.…

The physics of Teardown may not be realistic, but that's not what was asked for - and the physics of Teardown are DEFINITELY impressive.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#64

Post by saturn5k »

arketyp wrote: post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

https://www.beamng.com/game/ - possibly the best driving / soft body physics out there..

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#65

Post by taiiat »

airstrike wrote: post #53
yboris wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teardown - hands down one of the most innovative games in the last several years. It uses voxels and the game premise is destroying the environment to create an escape route once you trigger the alarm (by stealing required objects). https://store.steampowered.com/app/1167630/Teardown/

Looking at a gameplay video on YT ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P--c8rjcSDs ), I didn't come away with the same impression as you described, or at least it doesn't really answer the parent's question. Sure, it is "fully destructible" but everything kinda breaks the same way because it's all voxels, and things like driving a seemingly indestructible truck through multiple walls doesn't feel particularly realistic.…

Uhhh, Physics are indeed a major part of Teardown. the breaking of the Voxels themselves may not be individually impressive, but it's the nearly entirely destructible Environment with per Voxel calculated Materials that IS impressive. Voxels can be of a wide range of Materials, giving them, well, unique properties. that allows things to be strong, weak, and all sorts of other properties. Driving a Truck through a Building doesn't leave it unscathed, actually. Et Cetera.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#66

Post by Corazoor »

evnix wrote: post #26
arketyp wrote: post #25

What are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.

apart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago. I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.

Cyberpunk 2077 at least pushed the rendering part of the engine into next-gen territory: Volumetric lightning and fog almost everywhere, environment reflection on even the smallest water surface and monochromatic light actually turns many surfaces into mirrors. All that in an outdoors setting with a ton of assets and an almost impracticle amount of verticality (no naturally empty half of the Screen). Before that release, most game devs would have told you that this is still impossible on todays hardware.

But that engine also shows that you are not wrong with your remark about consoles holding progress back: The game barely ran on the ps4, and even on the ps5 you won't get stellar framerates... You need a really nice PC to run the thing smoothely...

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#67

Post by cypress66 »

boarnoah wrote: post #35
cypress66 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably do, as unreal engine and unity both use physx. Just not the old system level libraries that are used for old games.

Incidentally UE with 4.26+ (and more so 5, which is almost a complete cutover) switches from PhysX to their in-house solution of Chaos. A lot of it has to do with determinism over the network IIUC.

4.26 and 4.27 still use physx by default, and their chaos version is basically unusable[1] (because of bugs and performance). There is a 4.27-chaos branch which is more updated (maybe the same version as Ue5 chaos?) but I don't know how usable it is.

But yes the future for UE is chaos.

[1] to be fair fortnite used it, but clearly they optimized and fixed only the subset of features that fortnite uses.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#68

Post by rasz »

dagmx wrote: post #21
rasz wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont forget to mention it was pure scam, PhysX PCI "accelerator" actually ran those supported games slower, sometimes Two times slower, than software. https://www.anandtech.com/show/2001/4

You miss the important bits: > As we said before, installing the hardware automatically enables higher quality physics. We can't get a good idea of how much better the PhysX hardware would perform than the CPU, but we can see a couple facts very clearly. So what you call a scam is down to implementation details. In a true like for like scenario the PPU would usually outperform the CPU implementation as long as your s…

Its a game, the important bit is playable framerate. There arent any nuances when you are hitting drops to 17 fps.

>down to implementation details

Game is running 2 times slower. Nvidia favorite kind of technology. Tessellation, Gameworks, Hairworks, RTX, all run at lest 2x slower when enabled unless you buy Nvidia flagship hardware.

Did you know Nvidia physx library shipped compiled for FPU? At the time SSE2 was available for 10 years and SSE3 for 5 https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2010/07/did-nvidia-cripple-it... https://www.realworldtech.com/physx87/3/ Nvidia PR person tried claiming Physx actual computation is not a bottleneck, so they didnt bother optimizing :D If its not a bottleneck then why run it on GPU?

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#69

Post by debug-desperado »

I seem to get unpredictable, if infrequent, hard crashing when playing the PhyX-enabled game Control unless I set the Nvidia control panel option to run the physics on the CPU. System event viewer pointed to a failed assertion in the Nvidia driver. I'm not 100% sure this has fixed the problem but I haven't seen a crash since the change.

Since gfx benchmarking is stable and MemTest86 never found anything, the only other culprit would be power transients. I'm using a relatively modest 200 watt RTX 3060 ti so I hope it wouldn't be that.

Just wanted to bring this up because I'm not the only one that has experienced this, it was a recommendation from a Steam discussion. And by hard system crash I mean full system reboot.

Re: Nvidia PhysX 5.0

#70

Post by rhn_mk1 »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #55
rhn_mk1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playstation is a PC with extra lockdown. So is Xbox. The Switch is similar hardware to Nvidia Shield, which is just another general computer (it can run Nvidia's version of Ubuntu). So the differentiator these days seems to be running custom software. Which Steam Deck is also running. The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown". That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't make sense in the cont…

Another definition of "console" might be "specialized and/or custom hardware designed mostly for playing games" without regards to the software.

That definition also captures the Steam Deck. And I think it's fine. It exposes that "console" being separate from "general purpose computer" is either an anachronism or a marketing ploy.
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