When it comes to PC adherents, there’s still a debate between which is the better GPU purveyor – AMD or Nvidia. It’s easy. when it comes to price to performance, AMD is king, but when it comes to features and performance, Nvidia is the champion. I may be biased, but there’s one reason I favour the green GPU company; it bought up PhysX and threw hardware implementation of the feature in its cards. If you’ve ever played a Batman Arkham game, or even Borderlands 2 with full hardware PhysX, you know there’s no going back. And here’s what you can expect from PhysX in the future.
It shows of PhysX Flex, the company’s new particle-based simulation techniques that’ll be used for things like smoke, cloth, rope and fluid effects, and it;s the sort of stuff that makes people who appreciate the tech and science behind the games we play go weak at the knees. Take a look.
Unified Particle Physics for Real-Time Applications – SIGGRAPH 2014 from Miles Macklin on Vimeo.
It comes courtesy of Miles Macklin’s demo for SIGGRAPH 2014. Macklin worked on Batman: Arkham Asylum at Rocksteady, so he knows a thing or two about actually implementing these features in games. Still, this sort of stuff would crush current GPU’s, and it’ll be some time before we see this in games.
“Using particles connected by constraints as our fundamental building block allows us to treat contact and collisions in a unified manner, and we show how this representation is flexible enough to model gases, liquids, deformable solids, rigid bodies and clothing with two-way interactions,” he says of his work. You can read more about it here, while you stare forlornly out of the window waiting for games that use these features.
Sorry AMD fans. You can’t have these things.
Last Updated: May 16, 2014
Ottokie
May 16, 2014 at 08:33
WoW that header… a wild Photoshop genius appears!
Admiral Chief in Space
May 16, 2014 at 08:42
I dunno, looks real to me 😛
(and by real, I mean the fact that photoshop was used)
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 08:43
Well, in that case all photographs are real these days.
RinceBroken
May 16, 2014 at 08:43
So true. You see that crap gamer porn mag yesterday?
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 08:48
I erased it from my memory until you mentioned it again now. Thanks a lot. 😉
But seriously. That’s damn embarrassing.
RinceBroken
May 16, 2014 at 08:53
Hehe. What I thought embarrassing were the people trying to defend the idea because we are hypocrites as there is ONE ION each day… The fact that Darryn has been on one of them says it all 0-O
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 08:54
Quite true and also, people don’t come here because of the ION headers. They come here for us glorious people in the comments section. Then some of them actually read the articles too. ;P
RinceBroken
May 16, 2014 at 08:55
Articles?
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 08:56
Below the picture. Above the comments.
I know right??
Alien Emperor Trevor
May 16, 2014 at 08:57
I know. I only read the articles for the boobs. Er.. not boobs, I mean “glorious people in the comments section”.
RinceBroken
May 16, 2014 at 08:57
Whew, close.
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 08:58
Nice save. No one will notice.
HvR - THE Average GAmer
May 16, 2014 at 09:20
Articles??? I come here to rip on you and the copper head. Makes me me feel better about my own sad life.
Jedi JJ
May 16, 2014 at 09:31
You have a life? 😉
Alien Emperor Trevor
May 16, 2014 at 08:49
It’s not a gamer porn mag. It’s a porn mag for people with a gamer girl fetish. No different from nurses or whatever.
Grant [_G_] Hancock
May 16, 2014 at 08:58
Wait ? … So ‘Hot Nurse Weekly’ IS NOT targeted at Doctors ????
Alien Emperor Trevor
May 16, 2014 at 09:04
Of course not, it’s for fire fighters.
Weanerdog
May 16, 2014 at 10:40
Well here is something totally off subject
Alien Emperor Trevor
May 16, 2014 at 08:43
I’m perfectly okay with not having those things.
Kromas
May 16, 2014 at 09:18
People are moving away from PhysX anyways. Havoc is perfectly capable of handling physics with less Nvidia BS. Also AMD has prettier hair. 😛
Maxiviper117
May 17, 2014 at 23:13
Check out this playable physics Tech demo. You can download the demo off their site to mess around in it. only 90 mb in size.
http://youtu.be/X77cThD4vj8?t=1m14s
Sir Rants A Lot Llew. Jelly!!!
May 16, 2014 at 08:46
Do you even wipe bro? @ header
Alien Emperor Trevor
May 16, 2014 at 08:50
Check that puny neck okes. What is this? Some Gears reject?
Sir Rants A Lot Llew. Jelly!!!
May 16, 2014 at 08:53
Woah… those are some spectacular physics there. I love the PhysX engine.
One gripe I have is that it is taxing on a GPU as it steals a lot of overhead. They really should consider giving dedicated “CPU” like chip on the GFX card to allow 0 performance hit PhysX on any nVidia GPU
Uberutang
May 16, 2014 at 10:22
SLI. Just add a2nd or 3rd ‘lower’ spec Nvidia GPU and dedicate it to Physx.
Sir Rants A Lot Llew. Jelly!!!
May 16, 2014 at 14:10
No but that’s exactly what I don’t want. I have a lower spec nVidia GPU lying at home (old Asus 9600 Top) that I could use as a physX processor but the problem is you then drop down to 8x PCIe instead of full 16 so your primary card suffers.
SLI would solve the problem yes, but it’s not possible to always have two of the same card as it’s expensive.
What would be far better is if they put something like an ARM chip on the GFX board itself that runs the PhysX separately from the GPU and then the GPU and ARM-CPU can offload the info to the CPU and you get far less overhead loss than having your PCIe channels halved for a lower nVidia card just to do PhysX that every game doesn’t use or adding a second GPU that is expensive for SLI.
See where I am going with this?
Uberutang
May 16, 2014 at 14:15
I doubt if you will be able to see the difference between 16 and 8x pcie.
I can’t.
http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Impact-of-PCI-E-Speed-on-Gaming-Performance-518/#1080pResults
Sir Rants A Lot Llew. Jelly!!!
May 16, 2014 at 14:32
Those were done on a Titan. You wouldn’t see much lol.
On my system, when I put in the dedicated physx card some games lose up to 10 fps (560Ti PCIe2) in games that don’t use PhysX
derp
May 16, 2014 at 08:54
dat smoke.
Umar Returns
May 16, 2014 at 08:58
http://i1106.photobucket.com/albums/h361/Bump4/gifs/ogdwuv.gif
diceair
May 16, 2014 at 09:07
WOW I need a new GPU just for this demo.
DonJaime
May 16, 2014 at 09:22
What is this smoke glory hole witchcraft!
Devourer of Small Bunnies
May 16, 2014 at 10:05
I think I just cried a little
Uberutang
May 16, 2014 at 10:21
You can actually offload Physx to the CPU, but it will bog down the entire system.
Tiaan Pat
May 16, 2014 at 11:03
Poor bunnies….
MakeItLegal
May 16, 2014 at 11:31
oh my what a cool demo , Battlefield better step up and deliver ( oh wait they went amd )
Labey-Kun
May 16, 2014 at 11:46
This Physx is quite awesome especially the water effects I like it:D
bluegoon
May 17, 2014 at 05:49
DAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYUUUUM