Quote:
Originally Posted by Dent1
I'm not convinced, eye candy in like a library of <5 games in 2010.
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Thats why you don't spend a whole lot of money on a PhysX card. If you are going with nVidia as your rendering card, just stick with a single card, as most of the higher end cards are more than capable of PhysX by themselves along with rendering, they don't need a dedicated card. If you are using ATi, spend very little on an extremely cheap card. If he has spend $700 on a rendering card, obviously having the best experience possible is at the top of the list of wants, so spending $50-75 more for the little extra eye candy in a few games is probably worth it.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Dent1
Cant the 5970 render the phyx in software mode? it seems rediculous that Nvidia would pay off games developers to disable a ATI video card's ability to render the eye candy. In theory a workhorse like the 5970 should be able to render these physics without a problem right?
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The HD5970 can't render PhysX in any mode. There is not a system to render PhysX on any ATi card. Do not confuse PhysX with physics in general. There are plenty of software based physics options that games can use. However none of the commerically viable options that run on software can provide a level of physics close to the hardware accelerated physics that PhysX provides. Of course there is a software mode to PhysX, it gives generally about the same level of physics that an alternative like havok provides, this is what is seen when you play a PhysX game on ATi hardware(or turn hardware accelerated PhysX off). You can also force the hardware accelerated PhysX to run on the CPU, and as erocker mentioned the CPU isn't optimized for this, and hence the performance is rather poor.
Your assesment that nVidia is paying of game developers to disable something on ATi hardware is way off. It isn't about rendering the PhysX, it is about calculating it. PhysX is a propriatary phsyics engine that nVidia owns and develops. It can't run on ATi hardware, but that doesn't mean games that utilize PhysX will have not physics at all, they will just have physics about equal to what they would have if they used one of the alternate options of physics. So for game devs there really isn't a down side. If they use PhysX in software mode for ATi hardware the level of physics is similar to what they would have gotten if they use something like Havok, but they also have the option to use hardware acceleration with an nVidia card to provide physic beyond what is possible with Havok.