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Humble request to consider PhysX hardware support


HellbinderCE
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I am just tossing this out there.

I just got a PhysX accelerator board for christmas and so far the demos, games and UT3 mod that supports it really impresses me.

I was wondering if future GC games might benefit from hrdware physics support or at least having the option to offload the physics engine to a physics processor freeing the CPU.

As ginormous as the real time action gets in this game it seems to me that a space sim like this is the ideal candidate for a physics processor.

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It'll never happen. Here's why

1. The Aegia guys are a bunch of tools. At least the ones myself and some of my other industry friends have dealth with. I can't go into any further details; but lets just say that I've tried more than once to add support for Physx in our games; even UCCE and recently Echo Squad. Hopefully when they fire the person responsible, someone else will take over dev relations. Until then, it ain't happening.

2. Support for a HW that about five people have, is not exactly money and resources well spent.

3. Its not easy. The entire physics layer in the game has to be literally replaced. Which is why I was only attempting to do it back when I was tying down what to put in UCCE and then again when I started specing out GALCOM.

4. In the age of dual core procs, a dedicated physics HW is already obsolete. They had their chance long before dual core procs became prevalent. They bungled that too.

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  • 5 months later...

In light of the recent purchase of ageia by nvidia and their intent to run physx on the gpu,could we revisit this?

1. nvidia has to have better dev support than ageia had.

2. I think more of us have GF cards :P

3. Beyond my abilities,I'll defer to you.

4. Dedicated add-on..yes. Dedicated built-in...no. check out FASTRA

While we are on humble requests,what about really widescreen TripleHead2Go 2400x600,3072x768,3840x1024?

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We have no intentions of doing any of that in any of our games because it is not worth the expense.

Also, for our upcoming games, we are using Bullet physics, not Physx. I for one didn't have a good experience with the Physx guys. They're a bunch of tossers without a clue. At least the ones I dealt with. So no surprise that they failed and got bought out. Just like everyone predicted.

Even if physics moves to the GPU, it will remain a specialty item (just like SM 3.0, 4.0, DX 10.1 etc) that only few devs with the time and resources will bother with. Physics and AI calculations are far more advanced now more than ever before given the speeds of CPUs. So the benefits of using the GPU - not to mention all the hassles thats going to come with it - have been negated.

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