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PhysX Performance Tests - The way games should be played
Author: Will West
Published: Thursday, November 05, 2009
Conclusion
PhysX is becoming a very common name in the gaming world and NVidia has done an incredible job at making sure of this. Since the beginning PhysX has had a hard uphill battle to win over the minds of not only the user, but also the game developers. The first step to PhysX adoption is getting game engine developers to really understand and integrate PhysX into their applications. After that it is up to the game developers to leverage the PhysX API to add un-told amounts of realism to their game titles.
When looking at the games featured in this article we get to see some of the complexity that PhysX is adding to the PC gaming platform that even the most powerful processors and older Ageia PCI PhysX cards cannot handle anymore. Even a single GTX 285 doing both high-end graphics and PhysX can take a real beating thus proving that multi-GPU setups can offer more value to the gamer that doesn't require SLI to be enabled.
At the conclusion of our tests we can easily see a progression of how PhysX has been implemented in different games and how those implementations can vary dramatically not only in effects but in required hardware. Some games worked best when more horsepower was available while others actually did better when hardware was clearly dedicated to a certain purpose. Case in point, Batman: Arkham Asylum which actually ran faster on a single GTX 285 with a GTS 250 handling the PhysX calculations.
When looking at the games featured in this article we get to see some of the complexity that PhysX is adding to the PC gaming platform that even the most powerful processors and older Ageia PCI PhysX cards cannot handle anymore. Even a single GTX 285 doing both high-end graphics and PhysX can take a real beating thus proving that multi-GPU setups can offer more value to the gamer that doesn't require SLI to be enabled.
At the conclusion of our tests we can easily see a progression of how PhysX has been implemented in different games and how those implementations can vary dramatically not only in effects but in required hardware. Some games worked best when more horsepower was available while others actually did better when hardware was clearly dedicated to a certain purpose. Case in point, Batman: Arkham Asylum which actually ran faster on a single GTX 285 with a GTS 250 handling the PhysX calculations.
The Future of PhysX
As of this article DirectX 11 is the hot new technology and there is talk that DirectX 11 Direct Compute and OpenCL will spell doom and gloom for PhysX. This is clearly a misunderstanding in how each of the two technologies work.
PhysX is a simplified way to do physics in the game engines. OpenCL and even Direct Compute are very complicated languages that work mostly on a driver programming level. PhysX is a programming layer that works independent of driver based technologies and allows the game developer to work through the complicated new language with an easy to use interface.
In fact PhysX is actually embracing these new technologies to make a better overall experience for the gamer and developers. So forget that PhysX is dead because it is going to thrive with this new environment.
PhysX is a simplified way to do physics in the game engines. OpenCL and even Direct Compute are very complicated languages that work mostly on a driver programming level. PhysX is a programming layer that works independent of driver based technologies and allows the game developer to work through the complicated new language with an easy to use interface.
In fact PhysX is actually embracing these new technologies to make a better overall experience for the gamer and developers. So forget that PhysX is dead because it is going to thrive with this new environment.
