ok, i ask you to explain the limitations of Physx, so you tell me to compare Physx to Physx? that doesn't quite work.
plus, that says nothing about the underlying technologies. my point is: show me the technical limitations that Physx surpasses yet still hold the competing technologies behind.
The physics on competing software technologies doesn't look nearly as good as PhysX does when run on a GPU.
Example: Smoke.
Havok's smoke looks ok, but not great. It is large blobs of smoke textures that sort of interact with the character. Also, the smoke quickly disappears, the CPU just can't handle calculating large amounts of it, even if it is low quality. See
here. Notice how the smoke is blob like, and not individual particles. For games, this looks like decent smoke effects, but really it isn't. Also notice how the smoke the the character interacts with disappears in less time than it takes for him to even run from one grate to the next? That is a really short time for smoke to last in the environment. Also, AFAIK, Havok smoke does not react to things like explosions, it is limitted to reacting to just the character and NPCs.
AFAIK, Bullet doesn't even provide for volumetic smoke in any form right now...
Now when you look at PhysX smoke it is much smaller particles, that react far more realisticly to the character. It also remains in the envirnment much longer. See
here. One of the main advantages also is that PhysX smoke reacts to more than just the character. And explosion will make it disperse, gunshots move it, etc. I have yet to see a competing technology do this effectively.
Also, there is cloth. Havok couldn't really do anything with cloth until early 2009, Physx had options for cloth vary early(2006ish). So when the engine for Batman first started being developed, Havok couldn't do cloth. A pretty big thing when you have a huge piece of it dangling off the main character, don't you think?
Now, the main thing that people seem to completely ignore, crazyeyesreaper, is that PhsyX can be turned down to run on the CPU just fine. All PhysX games allow this. Crazyeyesreaper says I'll just play it on console, well guess what, you get the same PhysX levels on the console as you get on the PC if you turn the setting down. Mafia II was the same way. And honestly, even with the setting lowered to allow smooth play on the CPU, the effects look as good than anything Havok/Bullet provides. And that is why some developers choose to go with it. They can provide GPU accelerated physics if they want, but still do CPU phsyics that is just as good as they get with competing technologies, and should be even better on newer games now that nVidia has released the newest version that supports multi-threaded processors properly.
Probably never will either.
