You're correct. You didn't say anything about Intel. My mistake. I'm so used to that argument I got ya confused
Anyway I don't feel Physx is inferior for its capabilities. I feel its inferior due to the way its executed. (Nividia only hardware). What I do believe is its no better than Havok and even when its GPU accelerated
I have yet to see something Havok cannot do and has been proven to do. Does it have more potential in theory? Hell yeah but I haven't seen a damn thing yet to justify a dedicated GPU other than some slick marketing by Nvidia.
As for adoption rates just look at Havok vs Physx SINCE physx was first released. I think you'll be surprised.
That is not an argument at all. I have yet to see anything that DX10 does or even DX10.1 and DX11 does that DX9 doesn't. Just like you, I'm talking about games, because if we were talking about the tech, there are plenty of demos that demostrate the superiority of PhysX and DX10/11.
Are you really going to tell me that this:
PhysX demo on UT3 -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nF7Iq9pzKRk&feature=PlayList&p=55C1A52A917B2DDF&index=7
and this:
RedFaction: Guerrilla -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U93lGcMC4mc
are the same thing?? And remember we are talking about technology.
It's been said already, the most prominent advantage of PhysX is in the power of the GPU and how it works. There's been plenty of games with destructable environments, but they are completely unrealistic. PhysX has the potential to make them realistic. That UT3 demo is still far from maxing out a single SP cluster in current generation of cards, they have around ten. As you can see
here and
here PhysX can simulate as many as 0.5 million particles and tens of thousands of rigid objects. More than enough to make an entire building made of actual bricks and columns.
Now wait, Havok, Bullet and many others are going to be able to do the same when running on the GPU? Most probably, but they are not here, and they will not be here until late 2010 or even 2011, while PhysX has been offering that potential since 2005. So IMO ANY ENTHUSIAST should be thankful that PhysX exists and should push for it instead of bashing it, because without PhysX we would never have advanced physics. Back in the 90's the GPU offered
nothing on top of what a CPU could do for rendering games. Only one company (3DFx*) really pushed for accelerated graphics and they did so with propietary tech
in a single game: Quake. Accelerated Quake didn't offer too much, compared to the CPU version but it showed the potential. History tells they were damn right about their vision. And yes their propietary tech had to die and it died, but you can't kill the tech before it takes off. Propietary tech MUST exist ALWAYS when talking about revolutionary new tech, because an open tech with no interested company behind it, will never take off, companies are lazy to push for something that will net no benefit and game developers are even worse, because they are very time/cost constrained.
Finally, PhysX adoption right now is much greater than Havok ever was, you should take a look at how many games use PhysX nowadays and how many are under develpment, you'll be really surprised. Remember: PhysX runs on the CPU too.
*I'm talking about pushing for it, not having hardware. There were other companies with accelerated cards, but none of them really helped moving the tech fordward.
