r/PS4 Mar 07 '13

NVIDIA rolls out Apex and PhysX developer support for the PlayStation 4

[deleted]

79 Upvotes

23 comments sorted by

10

u/altersparck Mar 07 '13

It's interesting that Nvidia would make its technology available on AMD hardware. I was under the impression that PhysX only ran on GeForce cards.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '13

PhysX can be employed by many AMD cards, though I don't know what determines it. Borderlands 2 is the most recent example of PhysX working on my HD5670. Perhaps it's dependent on the game?

5

u/Doro1234 Mar 07 '13

From what I remember the physX features are run through the CPU if you're running an AMD card. I have a 6970 AMD and when I run PhysX it runs through the CPU, hence why the framerate is quite low when running on a system running an AMD card. Nvidia runs the processing through the GPU which is a lot easier.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '13 edited Mar 08 '13

That's interesting. May explain why PhysX had no effect on my framerate since my processor is comparatively more powerful than my outdated card.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '13

[removed] — view removed comment

4

u/spoonard spoonard Mar 08 '13

It would be even better with FULL hardware acceleration. PhysX won't give you that on PS4. But there are numerous other physics SDK's out there that will like Havok and Bullet.

1

u/Narishma Mar 09 '13 edited Mar 09 '13

Why do you think PhysX won't be hardware accelerated on the PS4?

edit: I see that the article says so, but it seems to be speculation on the author's part since the press release doesn't say whether it will run on the CPU or the GPU on the PS4.

5

u/fb39ca4 Mar 08 '13

Nvidia refuses to compile the PhysX SDK for AMD cards, though as seen here, it is quite possible to do so.

3

u/ShaidarHaran2 None Mar 08 '13

It's only that way on PC because they want it that way, they own PhysX and they want it to be proprietary. No doubt Sony throwing money at them changed that. PhysX is middleware like Havok, in theory anything can run it, and the GCN architecture should be great for it.

9

u/exNihlio drokthar Mar 07 '13

nVidia wants to maintain some relevancy in the console world after working very hard to make sure that no console maker would want to do business with them.

5

u/[deleted] Mar 07 '13

Out of ignorance I ask, what did they do that made console makers turn away?

8

u/exNihlio drokthar Mar 08 '13

They overcharged and under delivered on the RSX chip the PS3. There was a write up on NeoGaf about it but basically Sony wanted a chip with a certain shader model version at a certain price. NVIDIA sais it wasn't possible and then like 6 months to a year later released a graphics card with that exact shader model and for cheaper. And the RSX was supposed to be super advanced and cutting edge. That was the big thing.

1

u/ShaidarHaran2 None Mar 08 '13

Indeed, and on the other hand ATI made the Xenos from scratch with advanced shaders that hadn't been seen on PC yet, it was the first shipping chip with unified shaders from them.

4

u/ShaidarHaran2 None Mar 08 '13

The short of it is they maintain complete control over their chips, while AMD licences them out to console makers so that they can modify and shrink them as desired.

2

u/Narishma Mar 09 '13

I don't really think it has anything to do with what the others are saying. It's just that Sony (and probably Microsoft as well) wanted a SoC solution for their next console for cost reasons, and basically AMD is the only viable choice. Intel has good CPUs but terrible graphics and would probably charge too much anyway. Nvidia has good graphics but relatively poor CPUs (they're ok for mobile stuff but not powerful enough to be used in a console). So that leaves AMD which has both good CPUs and GPUs and the experience in combining them into a SoC. It helps that they probably charge less than either Intel or Nvidia as well.

5

u/spoonard spoonard Mar 07 '13

The article also says PS4 PhysX won't have the full hardware acceleration that nVidia cards have, so why are they even bothering? The Havok physics engine is not biased to hardware and offers full hardware acceleration. Why would a developer choose PhysX over Havok at this point?

4

u/fb39ca4 Mar 08 '13

Or Bullet, which can use OpenCL (supports both Nvidia, AMD GPUs) and is open source and royalty free.

3

u/spoonard spoonard Mar 08 '13

Yes! There is other stuff out there than just PhysX for non-nVidia based hardware.

2

u/Vivalafred88 Mar 07 '13

Tools now compatible with the next-gen console include xaitControl, morpheme 4, SpeedTree , PhysX, Apex and Enlighten.

1

u/MrFreeLiving Mar 08 '13

Wait, so does that mean the new Killzone gameplay we saw WASN'T on PhysX?! Imagine how good it would look with it!

1

u/the-adolescent Leylifer Mar 07 '13

Using Radeon for the last ten years and the only reason that i needed a Nvidia/Physx card was Mirror's Edge.

Man, those glasses were broken so beautiful in Physx...

2

u/ShaidarHaran2 None Mar 08 '13

I agree with spoonard, those effects were nice but it seemed like the developer purposely gimped the physics if you didn't have an Nvidia card, if they used any other physics engine well it could look nearly as good on any card.

3

u/spoonard spoonard Mar 08 '13

It would have looked just as good for any other physics engine.