Nvidia’s done with PhysX, it seems.

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

  • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    2 days ago

    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)

    • GoodEye8@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      19 hours ago

      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.

    • cheesorist@lemmy.worldEnglish
      17·
      2 days ago

      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.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        20 hours ago

        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.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.eeEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        nVidia doesn’t really have that many successful unshits, historically speaking, do they?

    • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      52·
      2 days ago

      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.

  • hark@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12·
    2 days ago

    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.

  • BlackAura@lemmy.worldEnglish
    52·
    3 days ago

    My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.

    64-bit compiled games are fine.