Originally posted by: taltamir
Originally posted by: evolucion8
The Physix on GPU's is a nice feature, but yet far from being ideal with current GPU's, the performance drop is just too great. We all know that the UE3 engine performs quite fast and is very efficient, I would be hard to see GPU PhysX running smooth in more demanding tittles when is not even that smooth on the UE3 Engine. Physix on GPU is nice, but not until we have more powerful GPU's. HD 4870 is overall better than the GTX 260. I would pick the HD card.
that is not what I am seeing:
Physics (software): 11fps
Physics (with GPU acceleration): 40fps
no physics effects at all: 66fps.
The game is nice and smooth without any physX effects, with physX effect the game play itself jumps ahead by years, cloth, water, destructible environment, hail, secondary destruction. everything is just increased to futuristic levels. with the CPU only it makes you drop down to unplayable 11fps, with GPU acceleration you only drop down to 40fps.
This isn't an unacceptable drop, people take bigger drops for AA which brigs you a slightly sharper image, which is nothing compared to all those things physX brings.
It is also hard to quantify exactly how much performance you are giving up, because there are differing amounts of graphical features add, how many destructible items are on the screen? how much water? what about fabric?
The way I read the above figures is that GPU physX accelerate give you 3.64x the performance. The drop to 1/6th speed when doing CPU render only is just an indication of how much new physics effects were added. Games could add more, or less, depending on their target hardware. But for a given card, it can almost quadruple its FPS by accelerating physX.
The cool thing is, that NGO said they ported physX to AMD cards, and both nvidia and AMD engineers are now aiding them in developing it further. So I am sure it is only a matter of time before we see physX on AMD cards.