Recommended PhysX card for 5xxx series? [Is vRAM relevant?]

[Dr. Dro]

Mantle was never going to be the final product and as such was really only AMD's experiment which in the end turned into Vulcan
What nGreedia are doing is completely removing PhysX with GPU support on newest GPU's with no actual plans to replace it with a 64bit version allowing it to run on a GPU
They're two completely different things

In my point of view, the demise of both was just the natural evolution of things. Mantle was superseded by Vulkan, PhysX was superseded by Havok and many other vendor-agnostic, generally superior and easier on performance physics engines. That you can run on any vendor's hardware. When Mantle was pulled, all games which supported it became unplayable had DirectX 11 versions also made alongside them, which ran poorer on AMD hardware. It's the same here, with the deprecation of 32-bit CUDA, PhysX's removal simply regresses its state a little, to the same state it has always run in the competition's hardware.

I was never too fond of it, sure, some of the effects were awesome for the games of the time, but I've always seen it as a point of contention, usually on the side of dismissal. "CUDA isn't important"; "PhysX is a gimmick", "GimpWorks", all points i've seen thrown around to steer people away from GeForce... and now we get this outrage? That's my point. Big reason I'm not fond of PhysX is that it was always locked to Nvidia hardware, even more so than the performance issues.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

Because it's a new method that almost completely reinvents the wheel, raising the bar far higher than rasterization could ever take graphics towards photorealism. Its biggest drawback is the vast amount of computing power required to achieve the feat. PhysX on the other hand, is just an obsolete, proprietary physics engine that has long outlived its usefulness and suffered with optimization problems through most of all its service life.

path tracings is exactly the same physX. Photo realistic my ass, it isn't even close to photo-realistic. It's noise garbage & if rasterization were not need why the hell are we even using it with anything with RT??? Everything in the whole statement is completely contradictor to the facts of how things are playing out RTX & "path tracing" are becoming a propriety garbage, like it or not that's the truth.

 

[Athlonite]

PhysX was superseded by Havok and many other vendor-agnostic, generally superior and easier on performance physics engines

Skyrim used the havok physics engine and it was trash if you ran over 60fps shit would fly off everywhere when entering a room unless you diddled around in the configs to adjust timings for it or used mods to adjust for faster than 60fps

 

[Dr. Dro]

path tracings is exactly the same physX. Photo realistic my ass, it isn't even close to photo-realistic. It's noise garbage & if rasterization were not need why the hell are we even using it with anything with RT??? Everything in the whole statement is completely contradictor to the facts of how things are playing out RTX & "path tracing" are becoming a propriety garbage, like it or not that's the truth.

I think this thread is the ultimate proof that I am not full of crap. Low-end Nvidia and Radeon buyers have spent years upon years relentlessly dogging on GameWorks, and now that the feature that's arguably its poster child doesn't work anymore, it's something that is being weaponized as if it was an absolute essential. I don't necessarily believe Nvidia handled this the correct way, but I'm not going to lie about it, I don't miss it either. PhysX or its lack thereof have never stopped me from enjoying a video game.

Why does RT have noise? Simple: because the hardware is anemic and can't trace every ray, denoising algorithms basically attempt to hide the fact that rays are being traced at random (which generates the noise) by approximating pixels as well as the algorithm can. The less accurate your ray engine is (or the lower the resolution), the noisier the image will be. Nvidia's RTX denoiser has always had a very good level of accuracy, and it was still dismissed as "fancy reflections", again, largely by the same type of folks who cannot really run a RT game well due to their hardware.

Bookmark this post and tell me if people won't be all too happy once affordable hardware from any brand you pick can run it well

Skyrim used the havok physics engine and it was trash if you ran over 60fps shit would fly off everywhere when entering a room unless you diddled around in the configs to adjust timings for it or used mods to adjust for faster than 60fps

That's because the time scale is bound to fps, and Creation Engine always assumes it's running at 60 fps or below (iPresentInterval=1 at 60 Hz, this ini parameter controlling the presentation interval as a division factor of the screen's refresh rate, essentially a vblank every X frames command). It broke a lot more than just physics, Papyrus (the scripting engine) also ran faster and everything glitched as a result. It's not because of the physics engine used, Wikipedia places it at ~360 games using it and it's not an exhaustive list.

Even Fallout 4 is still affected to a degree, Fallout 76 isn't because the scripting engine runs server-side, I think the 64 bit version of Skyrim (SE) was finally fixed. Starfield is and has always been OK, as was Oblivion for some reason. Oblivion even supports ultrawide natively.

 

[DemonicRyzen666]

I think this thread is the ultimate proof that I am not full of crap. Low-end Nvidia and Radeon buyers have spent years upon years relentlessly dogging on GameWorks, and now that the feature that's arguably its poster child doesn't work anymore, it's something that is being weaponized as if it was an absolute essential. I don't necessarily believe Nvidia handled this the correct way, but I'm not going to lie about it, I don't miss it either. PhysX or its lack thereof have never stopped me from enjoying a video game.

Why does RT have noise? Simple: because the hardware is anemic and can't trace every ray, denoising algorithms basically attempt to hide the fact that rays are being traced at random (which generates the noise) by approximating pixels as well as the algorithm can. The less accurate your ray engine is (or the lower the resolution), the noisier the image will be. Nvidia's RTX denoiser has always had a very good level of accuracy, and it was still dismissed as "fancy reflections", again, largely by the same type of folks who cannot really run a RT game well due to their hardware.

Nice way to dodge what I said about rasterization being included with raytracing.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Why though?

-Because you can't build an entire Gen around features and then simultaneously depreciate features.

It's an uncomfortable reality that all the reasons to buy your Nvidia card can disappear randomly at some point.

How do you dunk and AMiDiots at that point? How I ask you?!

 

[Dr. Dro]

Nice way to dodge what I said about rasterization being included with raytracing.

Indeed, it looks like I actually turned your question back at you without realizing it. You are right about that, but my point stands, would you turn down fully pathtraced games if you could run them with the exact same performance, without generative AI crutches, or reduced resolution, noisy output? Most newer features such as image upscalers, frame generation, mesh shaders, DirectStorage/GPU data decomp, etc. are largely quality of life and performance improvements, with the biggest advancement in fidelity being ray tracing. Which is still too bloody heavy to run on currently existing hardware, which is why rasterization is still "necessary." The extra memory and compute power of modern GPUs is largely being squandered with unoptimized, extremely high resolution assets that don't even look good in practice, and this is coming from a dude who was insane enough to order an RTX 5090 for gaming.

The thing is, it hasn't advanced in some time. I think the last really impressive raster techniques introduced were soft shadows and subsurface scattering, at that point you pretty much got atmospherics and light simulation as accurate as it'll get on traditional raster graphics. I'm of the opinion that raster was fully mastered around the Pascal era, so much that the GTX 1080 Ti is still widely considered to hold up to this day, and indeed still fully serves the needs of many. AMD took a while to catch up, but despite being downlevel hardware with none of the newer DirectX 12 Ultimate features, a lot of people still defend the RX 5700 XT for the same reason: no GPUs released since that generation really yielded any tangible improvements regarding fidelity, and they'll run DirectX 11 games just fine. After all, this is still the prevalent graphics API today.

It's an uncomfortable reality that all the reasons to buy your Nvidia card can disappear randomly at some point.

Are you able to note any exclusive middleware with any degree of relevancy to game engines that was developed by ATI in the mid-2000's or - AMD shortly after the business was acquired - that is still supported and maintained on current-generation AMD hardware today?

 

[Assimilator]

TBH I really think NVIDIA should've built a 32-to-64-bit translation layer for PhysX. I understand why they didn't do it (doesn't make economic sense) but it would've been a much-appreciated gesture.

Skyrim used the havok physics engine and it was trash if you ran over 60fps shit would fly off everywhere when entering a room unless you diddled around in the configs to adjust timings for it or used mods to adjust for faster than 60fps

As the Genshin Doctor mentions, that is Bethesda and Creation Kit being crap - nothing to do with Havok.

-Because you can't build an entire Gen around features and then simultaneously depreciate features.

Sorry for calling you out but this is a massive pet peeve of mine: it's DEPRECATE, not depreciate.

 

[stahlhart]

TBH I really think NVIDIA should've built a 32-to-64-bit translation layer for PhysX. I understand why they didn't do it (doesn't make economic sense) but it would've been a much-appreciated gesture.

I don't understand why they couldn't have, with that "army of software engineers" they claim to have working on drivers.

Mantle was never going to be the final product

I wish that you could have been a forum moderator 10-12 years ago and had to deal with all of the obnoxious shills who felt otherwise.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

It was a heavily promoted feature

I will probably pick up a used 2060 for playing older games like that.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

Sorry for calling you out but this is a massive pet peeve of mine: it's DEPRECATE, not depreciate.

- "Deprecated" refers to software that is no longer recommended, while "depreciated" refers to a decrease in value over time.

I believe both make sense here. Of Physx specifically the feature is deprecated but in the context of Nvidia features as a whole they have depreciated.

But I'm not gonna die on this hill.

Are you able to note any exclusive middleware with any degree of relevancy to game engines that was developed by ATI in the mid-2000's or - AMD shortly after the business was acquired - that is still supported and maintained on current-generation AMD hardware today?

- Why even bring up ATI/AMD? Nvidia is the one selling everyone on the features of their cards. ATI/AMD are irrelevant has beens of the GPU market.

With a 90%+ market share, I think developments like this should absolutely give NV purchasers pause.

 

[Canned Noodles]

I am assuming performance is still bad with a dedicated card because PhyX stalls the entire rendering pipeline + overhead from copying the results from across PCIe

NVIDIA should do something about this. A solution to link cards separate from the PCIe bus… A bridge, if you will…

 

[Dr. Dro]

- Why even bring up ATI/AMD? Nvidia is the one selling everyone on the features of their cards. ATI/AMD are irrelevant has beens of the GPU market.

With a 90%+ market share, I think developments like this should absolutely give NV purchasers pause.

It's really because are the only company that has been around long enough to be a historical competitor to Nvidia, and well, you saw the thread. (likely empty) threats to "switch sides" are being thrown, condemnation of "nvidia removing things" that people spent years upon years shunning, go figure.

 

[GodisanAtheist]

It's really because are the only company that has been around long enough to be a historical competitor to Nvidia, and well, you saw the thread. (likely empty) threats to "switch sides" are being thrown, condemnation of "nvidia removing things" that people spent years upon years shunning, go figure.

- Yeah no one is going anywhere over this. People will whine and then go crawling right back to the only game in town.

If AMD had been consistently competing across all fronts maybe they would have caught a few people jumping ship but they're a CPU company who almost disdainfully deals in GPUs because of decisions made by prior management, and they'll catch no one.

 

[Bomby569]

cards at 2000 usd (or even mid rage approaching or surpassing 1000usd) and you have to buy another one to play old (really not that old some of them) games. If PC gaming isn't a meme right now, i'm the queen of England
This is increasingly looking more and more like the horse we could buy with real money in a game, i mean what can go wrong from this point forward


Peperidge farms remembers when one of the selling points of PC over consoles was the backwards compatibility

And there's people defending and reasoning this. Coping lvl 100

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Here's an old recording when I was doing Physx vs no physx with Cell Factor revolution. You had to own an Agiea physx PPU to play some of these maps. I never did get an NVidia card to run physx in this game though.

 

[chrcoluk]

It was a heavily promoted feature

I will probably pick up a used 2060 for playing older games like that.

To be fair looking at the first clip (didnt check the rest), it is a big improvement. Happy they didnt drop it sooner so I still have it on my 4080.

With the attention it has got from the media and community, I wouldnt be surprised now if Nvidia did some 32 bit physx binaries or emulation on 64 bit cuda.