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NVIDIA announces PhysX and APEX support for PS4

U

USC-fan

Banned
Heads up, folks. NVIDIA will be invading the PS4 as the company has announced PhysX and APEX support for the recently-announced gaming console. Both PhysX and APEX are software development kits from NVIDIA that will allow game developers to design new PS4 games with stunning graphics, similar to what we saw during the PS4 reveal last month.

NVIDIA’s product manager for PhysX, Mike Skolones, says that “great physics technology is essential for delivering a better gaming experience and multiplatform support is critical for developers,” and “with PhysX and APEX support for PlayStation 4, customers can look forward to better games.” Indeed, both PhysX and APEX should make games more realistic with life-like movements and scenery.

PhysX is designed specifically to be used with hardware acceleration in processors and graphics cards, and the technology allows for more complex and detailed worlds in video games, including more-realistic explosions, clothes that react more naturally to the wind and body movements, and of course, better life-like motions of characters.

Both PhysX and APEX are already integrated into a handful of games. NVIDIA boasts that PhysX alone is featured in more than 150 games, and is used by over 10,000 developers. Some games that are taking advantage of NVIDIA’s technologies include Borderlands 2, the Batman Arkham series, Mirror’s Edge, and Metro 2033.
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http://www.slashgear.com/nvidia-announces-physx-and-apex-support-for-ps4-07272935/
 
J

JaseC

gave away the keys to the kingdom.
Makes sense considering they both exist as multiplatform middleware. PhysX in particular exists both as a GPU-accelerated (what Nvidia moneyhats in select PC games) and software-based (what you're seeing here) solution.
 
A

Angelus Errare

Banned
FStop7 said:
I think it stopped being exclusive a while ago. I have an AMD card and when I enabled PhysX in Borderlands 2 it worked fine.
Click to expand...

You could always enable PhysX on non Nvidia hardware, it just defaults to your CPU instead of utilizing your GPU. A GPU is much more suited to physics than a CPU will ever be, even if Nvidia allowed multithreading on the CPU.
 
B

Beer Monkey

Member
FStop7 said:
I think it stopped being exclusive a while ago. I have an AMD card and when I enabled PhysX in Borderlands 2 it worked fine.
Click to expand...

From Wikipedia:

Versions 186 and newer of the ForceWare drivers disable PhysX hardware acceleration if a GPU from a different manufacturer, such as AMD, is present in the system.[14] Representatives at Nvidia stated to customers that the decision was made due to development expenses, and for quality assurance and business reasons.[15] This decision has caused a backlash from the community that led to the creation of a community patch for Windows 7, circumventing the GPU check in Nvidia's updated drivers. To counter this patch, Nvidia implemented a time bomb in driver versions 196 and 197 that slowed down hardware accelerated PhysX and reversed the gravity,[16] but an updated version of the patch removed all unwanted effects.[17]
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So I'm guessing if you are having your GPU, not your CPU, accellerating Borderlands 2, you are running old drivers or have hacked your drivers.
 
V

vocab

Member
Great, more games with unoptimized and completely overblown physics to show what your hardware can't do.
 
U

USC-fan

Banned
Fried Food said:
whats APEX?
Click to expand...

APEX is a multi-platform, scalable dynamics framework, which puts the artist into the driver seat to quickly create dynamic interactive content. APEX is completely artist focused by providing the artist with familiar and easy to use authoring tools. The tools are designed to let the artist focus on the game and its critical assets, rather than struggle with having to program in low-level APIs.
Click to expand...
https://developer.nvidia.com/apex

Tech demo videos on that site.
 
S

Somnid

Member
Nvidia really wants to have some of the dedicated gaming pie. Though this is meaningless without GPGPU functionality and if they have that then not having it on PC AMD cards is really dumb. How about we start there Nvidia?
 
M

mrsmr2

Member
Beer Monkey said:
From Wikipedia:



So I'm guessing if you are having your GPU, not your CPU, accellerating Borderlands 2, you are running old drivers or have hacked your drivers.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but how many people run Forceware drivers and an AMD GPU?

Borderlands 2 for example, Physx runs fine with an AMD GPU as long as Physx is installed on the PC. Physx is simply off-loaded to the CPU.
 
O

Osiris

I permanently banned my 6 year old daughter from using the PS4 for mistakenly sending grief reports as it's too hard to watch or talk to her
There is zero chance that nVidia would restrict this version of PhysX to the CPU, regardless of what they do on the PC.

To do so would be to cripple their own middleware in the market, leaving others to fill the void for GPU accelerated physics on both the PS4 & 720.
 
U

USC-fan

Banned
S

Shao Kahn Brewing a Stew

Banned
Great move/news! Here's a list of all middleware companies whose Physics/AI/Animation tools are supported by PS4:

Babelflux
Havok
NaturalMotion
Nvidia
xaitment

Surprised AMD is not in the list, unless it's a common sense thing...
 
A

Angelus Errare

Banned
shagg_187 said:
Great move/news! Here's a list of all middleware companies whose Physics/AI/Animation tools are supported by PS4:

Babelflux
Havok
NaturalMotion
Nvidia
xaitment

Surprised AMD is not in the list, unless it's a common sense thing...
Click to expand...

Why would AMD be on the list? AMD doesn't have any middleware currently. It remains to be seen if TressFX is a complete middleware solution.
 
U

USC-fan

Banned
Margalis said:
Surprising if you know nothing about console game development and don't know that PhysX supports basically every platform on earth.
Click to expand...

Are they gpu accelerated on console? Would be crazy if this doesnt support gpu acceleration on PS4. We already know physx will run fine on amd gpus. It ran fine until nvidea disable other gpu support with a patch.
 
synce

synce

Member
I'm more anxious to see TressFX support. If my laptop can handle it at 720p30, I'm hopeful a console environment can achieve 1080p60
 
M

Margalis

Banned
USC-fan said:
Are they gpu accelerated on console?
Click to expand...

360 / PS3 / Wii don't support generic GPU computation very well (basically not at all formally) and on all them the GPU is plenty busy just trying to run the game decently. So no.

Edit:
Sorry for being a bit of an ass earlier but I've become pretty touchy in dealing with analysis rooted in complete ignorance. Middleware like PhysX, FMOD, Scaleform, etc support every platform. The announcement of support is just a formality and completely expected. Not only is PhysX support for PS4 not surprising but not supporting PS4 would be very surprising and would essentially mean that PhysX is completely exiting the console space as it would rule out PhysX on all cross-platform games.
 
X

x3sphere

Member
synce said:
I'm more anxious to see TressFX support. If my laptop can handle it at 720p30, I'm hopeful a console environment can achieve 1080p60
Click to expand...

1080p at 30 would be a better bet... you need a 7970 GHz edition to get 60 FPS in TR with TressFX on which is far more powerful than the PS4's GPU.
 
R

RoboPlato

I'd be in the dick
Awesome news. With it being something they can implement more natively it'll likely look less tacked on and really be able to add a lot to games instead of the weird, default particles that PhysX seems to use.
 
M

mkenyon

Banned
Angelus Errare said:
You could always enable PhysX on non Nvidia hardware, it just defaults to your CPU instead of utilizing your GPU. A GPU is much more suited to physics than a CPU will ever be, even if Nvidia allowed multithreading on the CPU.
Click to expand...
Only if the GPU does compute well. If it doesn't, then this isn't really true.
Ty4on said:
Why can't my very similar Radeon card also have Physx? -_-
Click to expand...
You can offload it to the CPU, just as I assume they will be doing here.
Osiris said:
There is zero chance that nVidia would restrict this version of PhysX to the CPU, regardless of what they do on the PC.

To do so would be to cripple their own middleware in the market, leaving others to fill the void for GPU accelerated physics on both the PS4 & 720.
Click to expand...
With the amount of threads available on the CPU, and the fact that the CPU and GPU are essentially sharing a workload, it doesn't really follow that it would be a mistake, considering that CPUs are generally better at compute than video cards designed for rendering video.
 
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