NVIDIA shows off Hawken's PhysX capabilities

[Rob Williams]

This almost makes me want to actually give the game a go.

[DarkStarr]

No.... Just no. Fuck Nvidia and their proprietary PhysX. If it was GPU accelerated (as in they allowed Radeons to truly utilize PhysX) AMD chips WOULD run it much better, that's why they won't do it.

EDIT: That was before the video, however I still stand by it. The game does look pretty cool. Too bad I dont have my 480 laying around to toss in as a PhysX card to hybrid with my 7970.

[Rob Williams]

"Fuck Nvidia and their proprietary PhysX."

I am not sure I'd call it proprietary really, because if an NVIDIA card is not installed, the effects will be relegated to the CPU instead. A proprietary feature would mean that it couldn't be used at all without the proper hardware.

"If it was GPU accelerated (as in they allowed Radeons to truly utilize PhysX) AMD chips WOULD run it much better, that's why they won't do it."

What leads you to assume this?

I find it a little odd that so many people are at NVIDIA's throat over PhysX. It could have just as easily been AMD that purchased AGEIA and wound up in the same situation. But apparently AMD didn't have the foresight to see value in it, and instead decided to sit back and wait for another open solution to come along. It didn't even try to create a competing solution. If you want an even better example of AMD resting on its laurels, look at GPGPU. NVIDIA was the company that even made that a thing to the mass market. It took years after NVIDIA released CUDA for AMD to follow-up with something tangible.

This all aside, unless the game prevents you from even activating PhysX if no NVIDIA card is installed (unlikely, but it's up to the developer, or the level of NVIDIA pressure on the developer), nothing stops AMD users from enabling it and seeing where it gets them. Borderlands 2 runs just fine with PhysX High for a lot of AMD users. Your luck will improve if you have a good CPU.

[DarkStarr]

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

"because if an NVIDIA card is not installed, the effects will be relegated to the CPU instead."

Not Exactly, as you saw with it on they said the Apex stuff was ONLY on Nvidia hardware, meaning even with a CPU it wouldn't look like that.

Originally Posted by Rob Williams

"If it was GPU accelerated (as in they allowed Radeons to truly utilize PhysX) AMD chips WOULD run it much better, that's why they won't do it."

What leads you to assume this?

The reason I say Radeons could run it better is because we all know which cards to get to do ANY distributed computing. (Hint its not Nvidia unless its F@H) Personally the big thing for me, is the fact some PhysX stuff only runs on the actual Nvidia hardware. The other thing is say you want AMD but have a decent Nvidia card to run as a PhysX card, too bad Nvidia wont support it and specifically disable things in their drivers if you are running an AMD card.

I mean I had PhysX benchmarks from when I had an AMD chip and a Radeon card and then with a 275 as PhysX. With the PhysX card (with a Hybrid PhysX patch) it scored 3x as high with more effects.

EDIT: I wanted to play Hawken.... Too bad the launcher seems to have an issue (on my system and several others) and no one knows why.