Honestly, this is appealing to me. Usually, the Physx stuff is not a huge deal, but this might actually have an affect in whether I decide to go nVidia or AMD for my next video card purchase. Any opinons on which would be a better choice in general? This water physics is really impressive, but AMD's cards usually have more raw computing power, but nVidia has CUDA cores which might be useful in the future in their own right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6WZZARzpckw
physX is a gimmick, why would I want my GPU which is the main bottlenecker of games to also be stress for physics calculations while games barley use 3 cores of your 8 thread system
devs/publishers need to stop being so damn lazy and make their own CPU physics system instead of paying licensing fees for physX
also CUDA Cores are a fancy name for stream proccessors, which is what amd cards have
cuda language is also less effecient than openCL
/thread
Should doesn't mean will. As of now, nVidia is what is making the developments. It would be great to see the game developers utilize cpus better, but that doesn't seem to be in the works too much.
Nvidia never made one of those tech demos that ended up in any games.
AMD implemented compute physics in Tomb Raider in such a way that it runs on any hardware, and just by doing that, they've done more for gaming physics than Nvidia has in the 6 or 7 years they've been touting PhysX.
I'm afraid PhysX is nVidias way of locking games into the 'runs best on nvidia'-mode.
That being said, if you dont have it, you are held back a little bit in some games (since the engine expects it) but most of the time you can (thankfully) turn it off.
For example in borderlands2 you could actually choose it to turn it on or off (weather u had AMD or Nvidia!). I have a 7970, when i turned it on, i had (ofc) serious framedrops. So i turned it off.
What changed when I turned it off again (qualitywise)? I have no idea. Perpahs someone could show me... But I had no idea at all. Nothing was sticking out...
The only real difference in that game was if you shoot the ground more dirt splatters up. Also the Sirens special ability would pull up a lot of mud and debris then shoot it out in the air when it was done.
I found the whole Physx debate interesting. I would love to see a well developed CPU physx that can make all the cores worth on gaming. That way our GPUs care of graphics and our CPUs take care of the math.