cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/33099518

TLDR: NVIDIA removed support for PhysX with the 50 series GPUs, resulting in worse performance with PhysX games than previous GPU generations

  • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Are there really any 32-bit era games that your CPU can’t handle, especially if you have a $1k+ gpu? This post is honestly pretty misleading as it implies modern versions of PhysX don’t work, when they actually do.

    That being said, it doesn’t make all that much sense as a decision, doubles are rare in most GPU code anyways (as they are very slow), NVIDIA is just being lazy and doesn’t want to write the drivers for that

    Well, at least you aren’t on mac where 32 bit things just don’t launch at all… (I think they might be playable through wine, but even in the x86 era MacOS didn’t natively run any 32 bit games or software, so games like Portal 2 or TF2 for example just didn’t work even though they had a MacOS version)

    • GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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      1 day ago

      You never know when old games just don’t work. For example I recently tried to play deus ex mankind divided. I have new hardware but I had to play on medium settings because anything higher would start killing performance despite the game being 5 years older than my hardware.

      I wouldn’t be surprised if some older games ran like shit on the 50 series cards whenever physx is concerned.

    • cheesorist@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      mirrors edge drops to under 10 fps when breaking glass which generates physx objects… with a 9800x3d.

      the current physx cpu implementation is artificially shit, the cpu can easily handle it nowadays but it depends on skilled community members or nvidia themselves to unshit it.

      • AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Hmm, I was not aware of that. I’ve seen (not Nvidia related) simulations with probably tens of thousands of rigidbodies running on relatively old midrange CPUs in real time, so it’s pretty crazy that it’s that slow.

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        2 days ago

        nVidia doesn’t really have that many successful unshits, historically speaking, do they?

  • kitnaht@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    It only ever got deployed in a few dozen games

    Is the only sentence in the entire article you need to be aware of.

    This is rage-bait.

    This is a list of the games it affects:

    • Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
    • Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2
    • Crazy Machines 2
    • Unreal Tournament 3
    • Warmonger: Operation Downtown Destruction
    • Hot Dance Party
    • QQ Dance
    • Hot Dance Party II
    • Sacred 2: Fallen Angel
    • Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason
    • Mirror’s Edge
    • Armageddon Riders
    • Darkest of Days
    • Batman: Arkham Asylum
    • Sacred 2: Ice & Blood
    • Shattered Horizon
    • Star Trek DAC
    • Metro 2033
    • Dark Void
    • Blur
    • Mafia II
    • Hydrophobia: Prophecy
    • Jianxia 3
    • Alice: Madness Returns
    • MStar
    • Batman: Arkham City
    • 7554
    • Depth Hunter
    • Deep Black
    • Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage
    • The Secret World
    • Continent of the Ninth (C9)
    • Borderlands 2
    • Passion Leads Army
    • QQ Dance 2
    • Star Trek
    • Mars: War Logs
    • Metro: Last Light
    • Rise of the Triad
    • The Bureau: XCOM Declassified
    • Batman: Arkham Origins
    • Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
    • Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel
    • Zoot@reddthat.com
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      3 days ago

      That list has some incredibly popular games on it… Hardly rage bait if you’ll get worse performance in the greatest AC game to have come out.

      • Korkki@lemmy.ml
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        3 days ago

        Yeah you are going to get “horrible” 100fps lows in AC4 and borderlands 2 whit physx enabled.

        How many of the two dozen games affected were already capped engine wise to 60 or 30fps because of console ports? If you can afford 5000-series then you probably also have a processor that can more than enough offset the GPUs workload. AC4 for example came out when gtx 980 was bleeding edge. It’s just what AMD GPU users have been living with for decades, and not even really noticing. Even my three gen old low tier AMD laptop with integrated graphics can eek out 30+ fps in mirrors edge with physX on and all graphics maxed. I’m sure all of these games will be fine.

        • EddoWagt@feddit.nl
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          2 days ago

          No those games are not fine on 50 series GPUs, they can actually drop down to 10 fps or lower

    • RejZoR@lemmy.ml
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      3 days ago

      CPU accelerated physics were severeley dumbed down to make PhysX look better and there are several high profile games on that list that will forever have physics stupidified because of corporate BS back then that affects them now.

    • RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      I played Mirrors Edge a bit. The only part of physx in the game that I remember, as i didn’t finish it, was that there were some random curtains that would blow in the wind and weren’t placed anywhere where they would actually matter

      • LaggyKar@programming.dev
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        3 days ago

        Mirror’s Edge actually had a place with tons of broken glass falling down, where the framerate would drop into the single digits if it used CPU PhysX. I remember that because it shipped with an outdated PhysX library that would run on the CPU even though I had an Nvidia GPU, so I had to delete the game’s PhysX library to force it to use the version from the graphics driver, in order to get it to playable performance. If you didn’t have an Nvidia driver you would need to disable PhysX for that segment to be playable.

        • RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee
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          2 days ago

          Ah, the good old days 😂 having to manually fix drivers but with limited help from the internet

          • Psythik@lemm.ee
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            2 days ago

            I disagree; people on the internet were a lot more helpful back then. These days it’s difficult to get people to care about anything, let alone compel them to help.

      • herrvogel@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        The only part of physx in that game that I remember is that it used to cause massive performance and stability issues.

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    It’s too bad the CPU path for PhysX is crappy. It would be a good use of the many cores/threads we have available to us these days.

  • BlackAura@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    My understanding is 32-bit PhysX games are broken.

    64-bit compiled games are fine.