PhysX question.
By
Father Xmas,
Posted on: 2011-09-03 07:58 in ALL ACCESS Gameplay Technical Issues Bugs
I'm afraid the PhysX that City of Heroes uses is highly old and outdated. It doesn't recognise geforces as PhysX cards, no matter how hard you try. Even then, it doesn't use it enough to stress your CPU.
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History.
CoH was one of the first games to use PhysX but it was with an early program interface from Ageia (original owners of PhysX). Ageia later changed it but still supported the interface the game used.
Then nVidia bought Ageia and only supported the newer interface.
Curse of being the early adopter.
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Quote:
City of Heroes leverages the Novodex API version of PhysX from AGEIA, not the Nvidia GPU PhysX API, so no, dedicating a card to Nvidia PhysX will not help you.|
Originally Posted by Red_X2
Ok, so I have 2 9800gtx+ cards in sli on my computer at the moment. When I was messing around in the nvidia panel I saw it had something like "dedicate this card as physx blah blah".
Now my first question is this: Can I use my old 8800 card as the PhysX card or does it have to be the same card like sli requires? The second question is if it PhysX makes any difference at all? Is it worth the time digging out the old card if it does work? |
If you have one of the AGEIA PhysX cards, yes, you will actually see a visual benefit of using that PhysX card in CoH. Novodex will feed a PhysX card more particle data than it will feed a CPU for the same settings. Incidentally, Novodex's passing of more data to the PPU than to the CPU for the same in-game setting may explain a couple of the more exotic memory leaks.
Oh, and please don't bother asking the developers to update the Novodex engine to Nvidia PhysX.
For starters, Nvidia PhysX is deliberately detuned for software physics calculations... one of the (many) reasons games that leverage Nvidia PhysX require chunky processor configurations compared to the existing processor requirements for City of Heroes.
Secondly, Nvidia PhysX only has full performance on Nvidia graphics cards... which leaves everybody on Intel and AMD graphics with no Physics acceleration... and worse overall performance.
Lastly, there have been a number of changes to the PhysX API and SKD since Nvidia took control. Nvidia PhysX is radically different from AGEIA PhysX to such an extent that it's not possible to just "drop in" Nvidia PhysX as a replacement. Moving to Nvidia-PhysX would require just about as much programming time as simply replacing the physics engine outright.
Right now the push has been for the developers to look at a physics-solution that can be powered through OpenCL, such as the [url=http://bulletphysics.org/]Bullet engine[/quote]. On paper the Bullet engine should be capable of performing within the same processor performance envelope as the 2003 Novodex engine, which in turn means that processor requirements should not be noticably altered. In theory it should be easier to optimize the Bullet engine given that Paragon Studios would have access to the source code.
Another advantage, at least to Bullet, it that is largely processor-agnostic, capable running on OpenCL+GPU, ARM, Power, and x86 architectures. Basically, the engine will run on anything you can throw at it, and can leverage any processor with an OpenCL driver for acceleration.
In practical terms this means that a Bullet-engine version of City of Heroes would be able to offer GPU accelerated physics on AMD, Intel, and Nvidia graphics-processors... a significant improvement on Nvidia-PhysX's Nvidia-only GPU acceleration.
Ok, so I have 2 9800gtx+ cards in sli on my computer at the moment. When I was messing around in the nvidia panel I saw it had something like "dedicate this card as physx blah blah".
Now my first question is this: Can I use my old 8800 card as the PhysX card or does it have to be the same card like sli requires?
The second question is if it PhysX makes any difference at all? Is it worth the time digging out the old card if it does work?