Particle Physics question

What are the differences between 'high' and 'very high?'

I see the option for Ageia (tm) support, and I see the following on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ageia

Ageia, founded in 2002, was a fabless semiconductor company. Ageia invented PhysX – a Physics Processing Unit chip capable of performing game physics calculations much faster than general purpose CPUs; they also licensed out the PhysX SDK (formerly NovodeX SDK), a large physics middleware library for game production.
Ageia was noted as being the first company to develop hardware designed to offload calculation of video game physics from the CPU to a separate chip. Prior to this, solutions from ATI and Nvidia had not been planned nor announced. Soon after the Ageia implementation of their PhysX processor, Nvidia and ATI announced their own physics implementations.

On February 4, 2008, Nvidia announced that it would acquire Ageia. On February 13, 2008, the merger was finalized.[citation needed]
The PhysX engine is now known as Nvidia PhysX.


Being as it has been three years, will we see Nvidia physics implemented soon? Or has it already and the in game text under options needs to be updated?

If I put a second nvidia gpu in my box will it handle the 'very high' physics calculations?

Thank you for any input.

Oh you mean ... nevermind.

City of Heroes integrated PhysX way back when is was newer than new. Ageia was giving it away to developers because they were going to make their money on the PhysX hardware. What programing interface to the PhysX library was changed at some point and what our game uses is the original. When Ageia was devoured by nVidia and the PhysX algorithms were converted into CUDA for the Dx10 cards and up, nVidia decided to only support the newer interface to the library and not the old one we used. That's why our PhysX hardware support doesn't work with nVidia's PhysX drivers.

Now I don't know how it changed or if altering CoH to use the new interface is a lot of work or not. I'm guessing nobody wants to figure out the original implementation of physics in this game.

As to High Vs Very High. Supposedly the software emulator for PhysX can only do High while Very High was reserved for hardware support. No idea how many more objects are allowed in the Very High setting. Never knew anyone personally who had the hardware to see the difference.

Yes, this is pretty much a non answer. If you don't see a performance drop between High and Very High, then leave it on Very High.

I increased to to very high earlier. I took a small hit to FPS, based on eyeballing the in game meter. Based on eyeballing my CPU meter I also dropped cpu utilization about 15-20% on all four cores.

I am guessing this meant the GPU picked up some slack.

When my new PSU gets here I will be putting in a faster cpu and a second, older, vid card and tell the Nvidia control panel to use it for cuda/physics.

I did a few missions in the praetorian tunnels, and saw newspapers flying around in the wind, as opposed to just laying on the floor.

I'll have to see what my storm defender can get going.

Be nice to hear a definitive answer so people can fully use their hardware and increase game immersion.