I tried out a physX based mod for Unreal Tournament 3 to see if it even works with the 9600GT I added to my GTX 280 and yes it does!
Screenshots don't really show whats going on, but I don't have a capture card for videos and recording 1440p on hardware from 2009 is not really possible.
The mod works with a few maps and was made within a few days as a quick and easy showcase for Nvidia.
On this map it adds hail as a weather effect with the hailstones as active particles, a few new weapon effects like sparks, objects that react to forces like boxes and containers that can be moved and thrown around by explosions, destruction of objects like the billboards and a few cover elements that can be blown apart. Oh and there is a climbing element in this level that you can now use as a trap for enemies by shooting the wooden planks you need to walk on or jump to.
The shock rifle now also has a gravity effect, pulling particles towards the beam or the ball from the secondary fire mode. Overall a really nice addition to the visual effects, fits perfectly with unreal.
When disabling hardware physX on this modded map, all of the processing moves to the CPU which kills the framerate. It drops to 8-20fps with the CPU at 100% constantly. While on the GPU side it only uses 5-10% of the 9600GT.
This is such a cool experience to play with. Back in the day I only heard about this mod but never managed to get it to work. I think I'm one of the few people who actually miss PhysX and extra cards used for parallel computing tasks. I know all of the good reasons why it did not take off, but I still wish there would have been a future where this technology persisted in a small enthusiast market.
I for one would love a full mGPU setup with quad-SLI + and additional PhysX card. Something about distributing workloads over multiple components is oddly fascinating to me. Especially when realized in a game application where specific parts of an engine are handled on seperate components.
If I were free to design PCs, I would start over completly. Due to cost effectiveness and standards we are immensly limiting progress. Yes my PC would probably cost 10x the amount they do today, but who cares
Why do we still need to design boards exactly the same way we did for 20 years. Why not do something bold and throw this all out the window, start over. Stop packing different things onto a single chip, start using ASICS for everything! No GPU, instead one card purely for texture mapping, one card for ray-tracing, one card for hardbody physics, on card for fluid dynamics, one card for final image composing and rendering! Stop putting VRAM onto the card, let the mainboard have a unfied, mirrorable DRAM cache attached to EACH expansion slot by an infinity fabric!
Anyway, physX is working fine. I have a blast with these demo levels! Gotta try and find more stuff like this.
