What is PhysX?

[c0d0ps]

Can you explain how it works and stuff?

I know a little bit how it works from what I have seen but not much aka not in depth.

[Recon97]

Simply,it just gives life like visuals(not graphics).Go to youtube,you will understand much better.

[MzCatieB]

PhysX is a Physics simulation program built and designed for CUDA architecture.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

[ShadowCaptain]

Pysx was invented by Ageia before nvidia bought it

 

Basically, back in the day CPUs were very weak and struggled simulating real time physics, as games started to have more realistic physics systems, Ageia realised they could develop a card that would act along side the processor and GPU and all physics calculations would be offloaded to the Physx card

 

(its a bit like a dedicated GPU/CPU just for physics)

 

Nvidia bought them, and implemented it into CUDA so that normal GPUs could run Physx (however you can still choose to run if off your modern CPU which is powerful enough to do it these days)

 

Basically, nowadays its just a fancy software trick as most modern CPU/GPUs are perfectly capable of doing it

[Shaqo_Wyn]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AVxlFZR8Xw

 

Linus gives a good explanation of the technology in this vid.

[D2ultima]

Pysx was invented by Ageia before nvidia bought it

 

Basically, back in the day CPUs were very weak and struggled simulating real time physics, as games started to have more realistic physics systems, Ageia realised they could develop a card that would act along side the processor and GPU and all physics calculations would be offloaded to the Physx card

 

(its a bit like a dedicated GPU/CPU just for physics)

 

Nvidia bought them, and implemented it into CUDA so that normal GPUs could run Physx (however you can still choose to run if off your modern CPU which is powerful enough to do it these days)

 

Basically, nowadays its just a fancy software trick as most modern CPU/GPUs are perfectly capable of doing it

 

Just gonna make a little correction here. *MOST* applications of PhysX that pop up these days work well enough on the CPU. Fog and particle effects and borderlands' cloth/blood? Sure. Those'll work fine on le CPU. It'll add a good amount of CPU usage however, so if you have heat issues or want to livestream the game from the same PC? I suggest NOT using it CPU-forced.

 

Some implementations though won't run on a CPU well enough, and actually DO need a recent nVidia card to run calculations for it. This is usually very advanced fine particles, like realistic smoke/batman AA/AC/AO fog/mist, etc. They're rarely found these days but do exist. I will also point out that if you force something on an older PhysX card (like forcing a brand new game with heavy PhysX particle effects on a 8800GTS as a PhysX card) it will not be fully capable and the main gaming card would still be used up & you'd see the performance hit still. So I wouldn't suggest less than say... a 560Ti? To run as a PhysX card if you need it in 2014. But like I said, the games where CUDA is actually needed is quite rare.