cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33099518
TLDR: NVIDIA removed support for PhysX with the 50 series GPUs, resulting in worse performance with PhysX games than previous GPU generations
Nvidia got what it wanted from Ageia when they bought PhysX, and that was improvements to CUDA.
Are there really any 32-bit era games that your CPU can’t handle, especially if you have a $1k+ gpu? This post is honestly pretty misleading as it implies modern versions of PhysX don’t work, when they actually do.
That being said, it doesn’t make all that much sense as a decision, doubles are rare in most GPU code anyways (as they are very slow), NVIDIA is just being lazy and doesn’t want to write the drivers for that
Well, at least you aren’t on mac where 32 bit things just don’t launch at all… (I think they might be playable through wine, but even in the x86 era MacOS didn’t natively run any 32 bit games or software, so games like Portal 2 or TF2 for example just didn’t work even though they had a MacOS version)
mirrors edge drops to under 10 fps when breaking glass which generates physx objects… with a 9800x3d.
the current physx cpu implementation is artificially shit, the cpu can easily handle it nowadays but it depends on skilled community members or nvidia themselves to unshit it.
Hmm, I was not aware of that. I’ve seen (not Nvidia related) simulations with probably tens of thousands of rigidbodies running on relatively old midrange CPUs in real time, so it’s pretty crazy that it’s that slow.
nVidia doesn’t really have that many successful unshits, historically speaking, do they?
You never know when old games just don’t work. For example I recently tried to play deus ex mankind divided. I have new hardware but I had to play on medium settings because anything higher would start killing performance despite the game being 5 years older than my hardware.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some older games ran like shit on the 50 series cards whenever physx is concerned.
I’m too poor to worry about this. My wife bought eggs recently
So you had an egg in these trying times, did you?
My wife had to start laying her own.
DECEARING EGG
I’m so sorry you needed eggs
The eggs have insane physics reactions though. So I got that going for me.
It only ever got deployed in a few dozen games
Is the only sentence in the entire article you need to be aware of.
This is rage-bait.
This is a list of the games it affects:
- Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
- Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
- Crazy Machines 2
- Unreal Tournament 3
- Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction
- Hot Dance Party
- QQ Dance
- Hot Dance Party II
- Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
- Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
- Mirror’s Edge
- Armageddon Riders
- Darkest of Days
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Sacred 2: Ice & Blood
- Shattered Horizon
- Star Trek DAC
- Metro 2033
- Dark Void
- Blur
- Mafia II
- Hydrophobia: Prophecy
- Jianxia 3
- Alice: Madness Returns
- MStar
- Batman: Arkham City
- 7554
- Depth Hunter
- Deep Black
- Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage
- The Secret World
- Continent of the Ninth (C9)
- Borderlands 2
- Passion Leads Army
- QQ Dance 2
- Star Trek
- Mars: War Logs
- Metro: Last Light
- Rise of the Triad
- The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
- Batman: Arkham Origins
- Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
- Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
CPU accelerated physics were severeley dumbed down to make PhysX look better and there are several high profile games on that list that will forever have physics stupidified because of corporate BS back then that affects them now.
I played Mirrors Edge a bit. The only part of physx in the game that I remember, as i didn’t finish it, was that there were some random curtains that would blow in the wind and weren’t placed anywhere where they would actually matter
Mirror’s Edge actually had a place with tons of broken glass falling down, where the framerate would drop into the single digits if it used CPU PhysX. I remember that because it shipped with an outdated PhysX library that would run on the CPU even though I had an Nvidia GPU, so I had to delete the game’s PhysX library to force it to use the version from the graphics driver, in order to get it to playable performance. If you didn’t have an Nvidia driver you would need to disable PhysX for that segment to be playable.
Ah, the good old days 😂 having to manually fix drivers but with limited help from the internet
I disagree; people on the internet were a lot more helpful back then. These days it’s difficult to get people to care about anything, let alone compel them to help.
I play several of those games
Lol keep buying Nvidia!
I actually wasn’t, no, planning to ride this 30 series out for about a decade.
It’s too bad the CPU path for PhysX is crappy. It would be a good use of the many cores/threads we have available to us these days.
The more you buy the more you save
My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.
64-bit compiled games are fine.
No, the card is broken. Only suitable for newer games.
Wow. I probably have played 4 or 5 on that entire list. And none of them in the past 5 or so years.
It’s still a shitty thing to do for sure. Maybe there will be a new “thing” that starts getting used instead? Ray tracing has gotten way more coverage than PhysX ever did, and imo is like 3% as good or interesting.
Physics actually have gameplay interactions that matter. Ray tracing looks nice, but is so absolutely expensive computationally that (imo) is not even CLOSE to being worth the effort if turning on, even with compatible hardware.
Give us better physics, games! My main time sink rn is Rocket League, and that game is literally nothing but physics. Mostly simple physics, but stuff behaving in a logical way makes my brain a lot happier than better lighting ever did.
I like when y’all grass became an actual object that could be moved around by players, or when tossing an item on the ground actually does it tossed down and colliding with other objects while texting to them appropriately (as in fire starting, or weight holding something down a certain amount). That stuff is potentially game creating, definitely feature drinking.
Has anything AT ALL been affected by “pretty lights” beyond making them pretty? If it has, I’ve never heard of it.
Keep games about a gameplay experience, not just a visual feast. Save that tech for movies or playable stories (ie Telltale type). Focus only on the gameplay experience otherwise. Toss in some ray tracing when you can, but NEVER at the expense of physics. It just doesn’t make any sense.
