Originally posted by: ViRGE
Originally posted by: aka1nas
BF 2142 doesn't have PhysX support at all, so it couldn't possibly be affecting things. The game must use the PhysX API for it's physics support to potentially use the card. The PhysX API also supports software-based physics and can take advantage of multiple cores in this mode. So, it's essentially similar to Havok Physics in that mode, except that they only have one unified API for hardware and software physics where Havok currently has two products that developers would license separately to use in their game.
So far, GRAW was kind of a wash with PhysX support. That game actually uses Havok for software-based physics and PhysX only if there is a PPU present. While the hardware physics effects were nicer, the net result was lower framerates due to all the extra objects on screen.
City of Villains/Heroes was a little brighter note. I received the game and a free month with the card, so I gave it a try. CoV does support the card and shows a fair performance increase with it.
CellFactor is pretty sweet and is probably the best showcase title currently. They ended up making the game a free download so I am going to try it now that school is out. I have played the demo previously and it was a blast.
I've also played played the Infernal demo on Steam and it does have extra effects if you play with a PPU, which make it a bit prettier.
I probably bought the card way too early, and I wouldn't necessarily recommend purchasing one right now until there is a game or two that you would actually play supporting it. I rationalized my purchase because I plan to mess around with 3d programming this summer (OGRE already has some nice PhysX plugins) and potentially do my Graduate Thesis on something involving Asymmetric Multi-Processing and offloading workloads to multiple alternative architectures. I was able to self-justify getting a G80 the same way.
Hmm, come to think of it, I think an 8-core workstation could be very helpful in my thesis also.
As another PhysX owner:
Cellfactor: You look at it for 15 minutes and then you never touch it again. It runs like crud even with the PhysX card, and it's a UT-style MP only game that only works over a LAN and comes with mentally-challenged bots. It's a tech demo, it's barely worth it at free.
The other games aren't bad, but none of them are remarkable. The extra effects in GRAW/CoV/Infernal really don't add much; they're all second-order goodies that have no impact on the actual game(and on a side note, the water physics in Infernal are silly).
Sadly, that's about all of the notable games currently out that even use PhysX, and it has been a good year later. AMD and Nvidia's rhetoric about GPU-based physics have pretty much killed PhysX as a product by enticing/confusing developers in to not using PhysX. The number of upcoming titles listed on Ageia's software page has shrunk in quantity and quality greatly over the last year. UT3 is the only major title still listed that will matter; it will make or break PhysX based on what it does with the hardware and how it performs with it.
But getting back to the GPU stuff for a moment, I would not expect to see this in the near future - I would not hesitate to say not to expect it at all. Havok FX is already over a year old and no one is using it, and apparently there's still no support for it in shipping drivers (i.e. stuff that works well enough to pass Q/A). This will end up like GPU support for hardware assisted video encoding: a nice promise that will be quietly swept under a rug.