Tuesday, March 17th 2009

NVIDIA Provides Physics Technology for PLAYSTATION 3

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Mar 17th, 2009 17:55 Discuss (70 Comments)

NVIDIA Corporation today announced that it has signed a tools and middleware license agreement for PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) with Sony Computer Entertainment Inc (SCEI). As a result, the binary version of the NVIDIA PhysX technology software development kit (SDK) is now available to registered PS3 developers for free download and use on the SCEI Developer Network.

The NVIDIA PhysX technology software development kit SDK consists of a full-featured API and robust physics engine, designed to give developers, animators, level designers, and artists unprecedented creative control over character and object physical interactions by allowing them to author and preview physics effects in real time. The continued adoption of NVIDIA PhysX technology by the world's leading content developers is resulting in games that not only look as realistic as possible, but also provides gaming experiences where the world's literally come to life: environments become highly interactive with effects such as persistent debris, including shattered glass and weapons ammunition, trees that bend in the wind, and water that flows with body and force.

"NVIDIA is proud to support PLAYSTATION 3 as an approved middleware provider," said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. "Games developed for the PLAYSTATION 3 using PhysX technology offer a more realistic and lifelike interaction between the games characters and other objects within the game. We look forward to the new games that will redefine reality for a new generation of gamers."

The PhysX technology source code SDK for PS3 and all major gaming platforms are available for license directly from NVIDIA. For more information on licensing PhysX SDKs or NVIDIA PhysX technology, please visit: nvidia.com/physx.

Source: NVIDIA

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70 Comments on NVIDIA Provides Physics Technology for PLAYSTATION 3

#26

ShadowFold

DarkMatterAlso help, help... it does help a lot in Vantage and games that use it. A different thing is that the results are not accepted because otherwise Ati fanboys would cry :cry: and get mad :mad:.

Uhh honestly, I could care less about vantage. And what games? Mirror's Edge? I beat that in 5 hours. Unreal Tournament 3? Game sucks and it only works on a few levels.
I fail to see what's so awesome about PhysX.

#27

MadClown

RavenasValve is an awesome developer man (probably one of the greatest ever, besides Blizzard and iD), but when it comes to devoting recources to the PS3, they friggin blow.

DICE makes Valve look like a kiddy developer when it comes to the PS3.

Why would they waste their time and money on PS3?

#28

leonard_222003

The point of physx is that it's running on graphics cards and makes some intresting stuff that can't be done by cpu that fast , what the hell it's doing on PS3 who doesn't have any great graphic card or cpu , any engine for physics is good enough for PS3 being havok or made by who makes the game , there was no need for Nvidia's physx because it doesn't bring anything new.
Well , we know why they do it , to spread it a little more maybe it catches and becomes a standard , i wouldn't mind if it was available for everyone but making it exclusive for their products only ( pc games ) i mind a little because i have ATI , next absurd step would be to make physx available for mobile phones and iphone's , java games needs some physx god damn it , we need this Nvidia :) .

#29

DarkMatter

ShadowFoldUhh honestly, I could care less about vantage. And what games? Mirror's Edge? I beat that in 5 hours. Unreal Tournament 3? Game sucks and it only works on a few levels.
I fail to see what's so awesome about PhysX.

There are going to be many games and this news about PS3 don't do but ensure a better future for PhysX. And can you tell me what's so good about DX10.1 (DX10 for that matter)??
It's not about what it does today in games of today, it's about the potential and that is very big. And not only potential, because it can be used to a high extent already, only because AMD and Intel's pressures has not been used widely.

Mirror's Edge, Warmonger, UT3 not even start to scratch the surface of what a card like my 8800 GT can do with PhysX, let alone the much faster GT200 cards. The only application that trully uses the PhysX engine to a good extent (not it even the fullest) is the PhysX screensaver which shows thousands of particles interacting like they would in real life and Cryostasis with it's particle made water, but this last one with much less particles than the screensaver. Just for comparison, Crysis, probably the game with most extensive use of CPU physics only has like 200-300 particles on screen at any given time. We are talking about 20x the particle number running smoothly in a 8800GT. That power can be used for many things, like interactive water and smoke, different cloth implementations (wood can be simulated with it to the smallest of the chips, also leaves etc.) and deformable meshes (like imagine punching a fat bastard and seing his belly wave :laugh:.

#30

DarkMatter

leonard_222003The point of physx is that it's running on graphics cards and makes some intresting stuff that can't be done by cpu that fast , what the hell it's doing on PS3 who doesn't have any great graphic card or cpu , any engine for physics is good enough for PS3 being havok or made by who makes the game , there was no need for Nvidia's physx because it doesn't bring anything new.
Well , we know why they do it , to spread it a little more maybe it catches and becomes a standard , i wouldn't mind if it was available for everyone but making it exclusive for their products only ( pc games ) i mind a little because i have ATI , next absurd step would be to make physx available for mobile phones and iphone's , java games needs some physx god damn it , we need this Nvidia :) .

The Cell is more than capable of handling PhysX just as well as a low end Nvidia GPU and probably better than the Ageia PPU, though I'm not sure.

Also Nvidia made PhysX available for AMD for FREE but amd didn't want it. In fact there was someone making it work in Ati cards and while Nvidia supported them, AMD didn't want it to happen and even worse, the project was cancelled probably because AMD asked for it. Just like what Creative did with the guy that did X-Fi Vista drivers.

#31

FordGT90Concept

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

DrPepperI wonder if this will use the cpu or the g70 gpu ?

I think it would have to be the GPU. No sense in releasing a developement kit for code that would run on the CPU anyway. Perhaps only the newer PS3s can run the code--Sony may have snuck in a newer NVIDIA chip at some point.

Remember, people have been folding on the PS3 since the PS3 came out. That means the PS3 is fully capable of running GPGPU code so there's no reason why it couldn't do physics processing as well.

It's hard to say where exactly F@H does most of its processing on the PS3 but I wonder if Sony made limited GPGPU possible before NVIDIA did on their own products. :confused:

All I can say for certain is this:
-Sony and NVIDIA worked jointly on the GPU of the PlayStation 3.
-There is only 3 days difference between the release of the PlayStation 3 (November 11, 2006) and the 8800 GTX/GTS cards (November 8, 2006).

It is reasonable to believe the GPU in the PlayStation 3 is more based on the 8 series than the 7 series. That, or 7 series expanded to support several 8 series functions (like GPGPU).

#32

scope54

FordGT90ConceptAll I can say for certain is this:
-Sony and NVIDIA worked jointly on the GPU of the PlayStation 3.
-There is only 3 days difference between the release of the PlayStation 3 (November 11, 2006) and the 8800 GTX/GTS cards (November 8, 2006).

It is reasonable to believe the GPU in the PlayStation 3 is more based on the 8 series than the 7 series. That, or 7 series expanded to support several 8 series functions (like GPGPU).

I think the PS3 was delayed for other reason and the GPU was finalized a while before it came out.
electronics.howstuffworks.com/playstation-three2.htm

And Valve most likely doesnt develop on the PS3 because its a lot harder to code for vs the 360. And why waste dev time and money to code for something thats not going to make you to much money.

#33

Ravenas

ShadowFoldThey probably don't see the point since it probably wouldn't sell well on the PS3. I think Left 4 Dead and Orange Box on the PC outsold the 360 by quite a large margin.. I don't think the PS3 would do any better since the 360 is owned by more people.

Eh, no Gabe Newell said himself that he nor his team knows how to code for the PS3. That's why EA hired a shody developement team to make Orange Box for the PS3. Orange Box on the 360 or PS3 sucks a big one...

The only game I wish they brought to the PS3 was L4D.

#34

Ravenas

MadClownWhy would they waste their time and money on PS3?

Show me charts from their marketing department claiming that it would be a waste of time and money...

My question to you is, why are you trolling this thread?

#35

Wile E

Power User

FordGT90ConceptI think it would have to be the GPU. No sense in releasing a developement kit for code that would run on the CPU anyway. Perhaps only the newer PS3s can run the code--Sony may have snuck in a newer NVIDIA chip at some point.

Remember, people have been folding on the PS3 since the PS3 came out. That means the PS3 is fully capable of running GPGPU code so there's no reason why it couldn't do physics processing as well.

It's hard to say where exactly F@H does most of its processing on the PS3 but I wonder if Sony made limited GPGPU possible before NVIDIA did on their own products. :confused:

All I can say for certain is this:
-Sony and NVIDIA worked jointly on the GPU of the PlayStation 3.
-There is only 3 days difference between the release of the PlayStation 3 (November 11, 2006) and the 8800 GTX/GTS cards (November 8, 2006).

It is reasonable to believe the GPU in the PlayStation 3 is more based on the 8 series than the 7 series. That, or 7 series expanded to support several 8 series functions (like GPGPU).

F@H does not run on the gpu. It runs on the CPU. The Cell CPU is essentially a PPC64 cpu with a bunch of shaders added to it. It is more than capable of running fully accelerated Physx.

#36

DarkMatter

FordGT90ConceptI think it would have to be the GPU. No sense in releasing a developement kit for code that would run on the CPU anyway. Perhaps only the newer PS3s can run the code--Sony may have snuck in a newer NVIDIA chip at some point.

Remember, people have been folding on the PS3 since the PS3 came out. That means the PS3 is fully capable of running GPGPU code so there's no reason why it couldn't do physics processing as well.

It's hard to say where exactly F@H does most of its processing on the PS3 but I wonder if Sony made limited GPGPU possible before NVIDIA did on their own products. :confused:

All I can say for certain is this:
-Sony and NVIDIA worked jointly on the GPU of the PlayStation 3.
-There is only 3 days difference between the release of the PlayStation 3 (November 11, 2006) and the 8800 GTX/GTS cards (November 8, 2006).

It is reasonable to believe the GPU in the PlayStation 3 is more based on the 8 series than the 7 series. That, or 7 series expanded to support several 8 series functions (like GPGPU).

As Wile E said F@H runs in the Cell CPU. But it doesn't have any shaders, it has 7 (actually 8 but one is for redundancy) aditional Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) which is a RISC processor core with SIMD operation. It's similar to the aproach that Intel will use with Larrabee, but with many significant diferences. From a pure number crunching point of view Cell is an 8 core CPU. The Cell processor on its own is capable of 100-150 GFlops in single precision and 14 GFlops in double precision which is quite a bit.

The GPU in the PS3 is no more no less than a crippled GeForce M 7900 GTX (only difference is that RSX has only 8 ROPs) with a memory controler and other logic integrated, or basically an IGP with the mobile version of the 7900 GTX.

#37

Wile E

Power User

DarkMatterAs Wile E said F@H runs in the Cell CPU. But it doesn't have any shaders, it has 7 (actually 8 but one is for redundancy) aditional Synergistic Processor Elements (SPEs) which is a RISC processor core with SIMD operation. It's similar to the aproach that Intel will use with Larrabee, but with many significant diferences. From a pure number crunching point of view Cell is an 8 core CPU. The Cell processor on its own is capable of 100-150 GFlops in single precision and 14 GFlops in double precision which is quite a bit.

The GPU in the PS3 is no more no less than a crippled GeForce M 7900 GTX (only difference is that RSX has only 8 ROPs) with a memory controler and other logic integrated, or basically an IGP with the mobile version of the 7900 GTX.

I called them shaders to simplify the description, as they are basically just floating point units, much like a gpu's shader.

#38

DarkMatter

Wile EI called them shaders to simplify the description, as they are basically just floating point units, much like a gpu's shader.

Yeah I guess you can physically describe them as shaders, although they don't perform any fixed function, any function indeed, except the elemental ones, just like any other CPU. But I think that "Cell is an OctoCore CPU" is just a better description and gets the job done.

#39

ZoneDymo

PS3 fans having major bebebooboo over missing Valve games so it seems :P.
UT3 is a great game.
PysiX is nice but they should do more with it, Red Faction Guerilla is a step in the right way (sadly, chunks of broken down houses dissapear after hitting the ground).

#40

Hayder_Master

ooooooooooh, we back and talk about physics again , ok good

#41

FordGT90Concept

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

I don't think we'll ever know for sure what's going on in there because Sony and NVIDIA are tight-lipped about it. One can say it is based on this (7800) and another can say it's based on that (7900 GTX) but the fact remains: it is purpose built. The defining feature between 7 series and 8 series is the ability to run GPGPU code. If the Physx code runs on CELL, it is a derivative of the 7 series; if it runs on the GPU, it is a derivative of the 8 series (perhaps a primitive version of what would become the 8 series).

#42

DrPepper

The Doctor is in the house

FordGT90ConceptI don't think we'll ever know for sure what's going on in there because Sony and NVIDIA are tight-lipped about it. One can say it is based on this (7800) and another can say it's based on that (7900 GTX) but the fact remains: it is purpose built. The defining feature between 7 series and 8 series is the ability to run GPGPU code. If the Physx code runs on CELL, it is a derivative of the 7 series; if it runs on the GPU, it is a derivative of the 8 series (perhaps a primitive version of what would become the 8 series).

The thing is the PS3's gpu could handle physX without being 8-series. Its all software related. I think though that it will run on the cpu because it has 7 odd processors and at least two won't be used in games.

#43

DarkMatter

FordGT90ConceptI don't think we'll ever know for sure what's going on in there because Sony and NVIDIA are tight-lipped about it. One can say it is based on this (7800) and another can say it's based on that (7900 GTX) but the fact remains: it is purpose built. The defining feature between 7 series and 8 series is the ability to run GPGPU code. If the Physx code runs on CELL, it is a derivative of the 7 series; if it runs on the GPU, it is a derivative of the 8 series (perhaps a primitive version of what would become the 8 series).

The defining feature is not the ability to run GPGPU code. The defining feature is the fact that 8800 has a unified shader architecture. The PS3 GPU doesn't, so it's pretty clear it's a 7900M GTX, exactly same clocks and manufacture process included.

#44

Imsochobo

But they wont let me use it for what i want to use it for!

I got 2x 7800 GTX @ home, could prolly snap those in and run physx if a ps3 can.

I would buy a 9600 GT just to play cryostasis without lagg, the only game i really cannot play smooth.

Why bother buying physx cards, when games run fine without, we need gpu offloading, not more load on them!

#45

Valdez

ImsochoboI got 2x 7800 GTX @ home, could prolly snap those in and run physx if a ps3 can.

I would buy a 9600 GT just to play cryostasis without lagg, the only game i really cannot play smooth.

Why bother buying physx cards, when games run fine without, we need gpu offloading, not more load on them!

I'm not clearly understand what you're talking about. You can run physx on your rig, in software mode (cpu), just like on ps3.

#46

leonard_222003

DarkMatterThe Cell is more than capable of handling PhysX just as well as a low end Nvidia GPU and probably better than the Ageia PPU, though I'm not sure.

Can the Cell cpu handle physx better than a phenom 2 or core duo/quad core/core i7 ? I'm asking this because i fail to see the importance of physx on consoles other than spread it a little more so it becomes a standard and yepyyy Nvidia makes money from this eventually chargin money for using their thingy.
Don't give me flops numbers that can't be verified and come only from the mouth of IBM.

#47

DarkMatter

leonard_222003Can the Cell cpu handle physx better than a phenom 2 or core duo/quad core/core i7 ? I'm asking this because i fail to see the importance of physx on consoles other than spread it a little more so it becomes a standard and yepyyy Nvidia makes money from this eventually chargin money for using their thingy.
Don't give me flops numbers that can't be verified and come only from the mouth of IBM.

Yes much much better than in a Quad. Remember the GFlops I gave? Well those are not the advertised ones. AFAIK IBM/Sony advertised it as being 256 GFlops. 150 is the maximum sustained Flops found in the chip, I think and 100 was the median low (when SPEs are used). It is commonly accepted that a Core2 has 8-10 Gflops per core depending on the clocks, more when overclocked. We could say that a heavily overclocked Quad has like 50 GFlops, versus the 150 Gflops on the Cell processor. The difference is that Cell's power can only be used in heavily parallel number crunching tasks (such as physics) while Core2 can run everything. Think of it as having 7 workers and an engineer, versus 4 engineers. 4 engineers are much slower doing the hard work, but all of them know what needs to be done at any given time. The 7 workers completely depend on their engineer's instructions.

#48

FordGT90Concept

"I go fast!1!11!1!"

DarkMatterThe defining feature is not the ability to run GPGPU code. The defining feature is the fact that 8800 has a unified shader architecture. The PS3 GPU doesn't, so it's pretty clear it's a 7900M GTX, exactly same clocks and manufacture process included.

But if that were the case then why is NVIDIA releasing Phsyx code when Sony already offers COLLADA which runs on the CELL engine?

#49

alexp999

Staff

FordGT90ConceptBut if that were the case then why is NVIDIA releasing Phsyx code when Sony already offers COLLADA which runs on the CELL engine.

Take Mirror's Edge, for example. the game developers have designed around Physx for the PC, so it requires no extra work to enable it on PS3.

Same goes for future games, if they are working on games that will be Physx enabled on PC, they can now enable Physx on PS3 without paying for coding another physics engine.

#50

DarkMatter

COLLADA is not a physics engine, PhysX is. Even OpenGL or DX11 don't make PhysX obsolete. That's a common missconception. A physics engine is no different than a game/graphics engine. You have D3D, but you still need to make an engine and not everybody knows, wants or can afford to make their own. Also making an engine is relatively easy compared to making a good/efficient engine. Most developers just license it from other companies or more recently some publishers (and not developers as in the past) create their own unique engine to use in all their games. When it comes to physics, almost invariably they license either Havok or PhysX.

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