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Nvidia PhysX 5.0
- zmk5 4y agoI'm happy to see this! Hopefully Nvidia starts open sourcing a lot more stuff.
- dagmx 4y agoPhysX has been source available since 2015 (3 clause BSD since 2018) , so I wouldn’t take this as an indicator in that regard.
- djmips 4y agoAnd only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
- fps-hero 4y agoConsoles and open source do not mix. NDAs prevent code using their APIs from being released. That said, a lot of open source projects have console ports, they just can’t be shared publicly.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoSteam Deck is in disagreement.
- dagmx 4y agoSteam Deck isn’t a console in any traditional sense unless we’re just going to start butchering decades of colloquial nomenclature . It’s a portable PC running desktop software from top down. Otherwise you might as well call my laptop running Steam Big Picture a console too. When the other people are talking about consoles, any sensible person knows they mean things like the PlayStation, Xbox or Switch.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoPlaystation is a PC with extra lockdown. So is Xbox. The Switch is similar hardware to Nvidia Shield, which is just another general computer (it can run Nvidia's version of Ubuntu). So the differentiator these days seems to be running custom software. Which Steam Deck is also running. The remaining difference is "console = extra lockdown". That might be a good definition in general, but doesn't make sense in the context of the original post > And only on PC and Mobile. Not on console.
- gunapologist99 4y agoAnother definition of "console" might be "specialized and/or custom hardware designed mostly for playing games" without regards to the software.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoThat definition also captures the Steam Deck. And I think it's fine. It exposes that "console" being separate from "general purpose computer" is either an anachronism or a marketing ploy.
- CamperBob2 4y agoSo the key distinguishing attribute that makes a "game console" a "game console" is its walled-garden nature? Nothing else? And not the fact that it's, you know, a "console" that can be used to play "games"?
- 29083011397778 4y ago> So the key distinguishing attribute that makes a "game console" a "game console" is its walled-garden nature? Nothing else? Practically? Yes, IMO. You can say it uses specialized hardware manufactured on a massive scale, with each gen being a distinct set of hardware with slight variations, but then you're describing an Apple M1 Macbook Air or Microsoft Surface. People have and will always gain root access, but the OEM doesn't typically like this, and goes out of their way to prevent it. There may be APIs the OEM leaves open to allow the creation of, for example, XMBC, but an XBox is hardly an open, general-purpose, computing platform. If you want to call it a console that can play games, then my custom-build Linux computer console fits that definition. Hell, I wouldn't have to even leave the computer console TUI to play Dwarf Fortress.
- djmips 4y agoI've worked on many console projects that use many open source libraries and some where the part that can't be shared publicly was still source available if you were a registered developer. Not disagreeing with you just sharing some info for others.
- m00dy 4y agoright. what do you think about nvidia's recently released gpu drivers ?
- dagmx 4y agoI think it’s good , but doesn’t change too much unless you’re a kernel implementer. They’ve been busy moving the vast amount of the bits into the GPU firmware (not uncommon, this is how Apple and some others do it too). I think the FOSS crowd made a bigger deal of it than it was because it appealed to their sensibilities. The best new OSS-ish stuff from NVidia is their research, and things backing that research. They’ve released a lot of their nerf tech in the wild and Warp (a differential Python to CUDA transpiler) which are very cool.
- TkTech 4y agoNot the person you're replying to, but those drivers are essentially just the communication bridge between the kernel and the "real" driver, which is mostly in the closed-source firmware blob. They're also woefully incomplete.
- djmips 4y agoIndeed, nothing has changed. This is just a revision. PhysX 4 source was available here. https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx/source https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx/sour...
- ChuckNorris89 4y agoFor the younger crowd, back in the day before Nvidia bought Ageia, you'd have to buy dedicated PhysX accelerator cards and stick them in your PC in order to use this tech in the few available games that supported it. Wild stuff. After that, PhysX API was accelerated via CUDA and the dedicated PhysX ASICs were discontinued. https://www.techpowerup.com/review/bfg-ageia-physx-card/ https://www.techpowerup.com/review/bfg-ageia-physx-card/
- jansan 4y agoInteresting. What was the target group of these cards? Gamers or engineers and scientists?
- dagmx 4y agoIt started out initially for academic usecases till the costs came down and it was then pushed for games.
- driscoll42 4y agoMostly gamers, here's a review from Arkham Asylum which showed how offloading PhysX to a GT 220 paired with a GTX 260 would help a fair bit with minimum and average FPS - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum,2465-8.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/batman-arkham-asylum,24...
- the_pwner224 4y agoThis is from later (2012) but shows some of the effects that PhysX enables in games. The "apex turbulence" in the second half of the video is pretty cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qhaEghJ74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5qhaEghJ74
- gabereiser 4y agoEven after the acquisition, people still used dedicated PhysX cards before multi-monitor screen stitching made SLI graphics visual based. Prior, you’d have a card in SLI to handle the physics for PhysX and the other for the visual rendering. This is great news. Bullet and others could benefit from this as well.
- bni 4y agoI always deselect this when I install the nVidia driver in Windows. I play none of the few games that are supposedly enhanced by it.
- anononaut 4y agoI can only think of Planetside 2 from back a ways, but they removed it for the PS4 release. Cool tech, though, I enjoyed it.
- cypress66 4y agoYou probably do, as unreal engine and unity both use physx. Just not the old system level libraries that are used for old games.
- bni 4y agook, cool, didn't know that
- boarnoah 4y agoIncidentally UE with 4.26+ (and more so 5, which is almost a complete cutover) switches from PhysX to their in-house solution of Chaos. A lot of it has to do with determinism over the network IIUC.
- cypress66 4y ago4.26 and 4.27 still use physx by default, and their chaos version is basically unusable[1] (because of bugs and performance). There is a 4.27-chaos branch which is more updated (maybe the same version as Ue5 chaos?) but I don't know how usable it is. But yes the future for UE is chaos. [1] to be fair fortnite used it, but clearly they optimized and fixed only the subset of features that fortnite uses.
- michidk 4y agoThen what about this? https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/PhysX/tree/4.1/physx
- xeromal 4y agoThat looks like 4.1
- whatwherewhy 4y agoThey don't follow semver. v4 is basically a completely separate product from v5.
- bri3d 4y agoFor what it's worth, PhysX 4.0 (2018) was also Open Source (3-clause BSD license). Previous discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589494 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18589494
- dang 4y agoOk, we've edited that bit out now. Thanks! (Submitted title was "Nvidia PhysX 5.0 is now open source")
- djmips 4y agoProbably should remove the 'now open source' part of the headline. Nvidia's own marketing page about the 5.0 release. https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/open-source-simulation-expands-with-nvidia-physx-5-release/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/open-source-simulation-exp...
- ensignavenger 4y agoRight, that page says "All CPU source code is available under the simple BSD3 open source license, and NVIDIA GPU binaries are included at no cost." So only the CPU code is now Open Source. Also, if you are building a game, wouldn't you want it to work on AMD GPU's too?
- arketyp 4y agoWhat are some games that have impressive physics nowadays? I remember being very impressed with Half-Life 2 back in the day, seemed like a leap. All spectacular looking games with crude physics nowadays remind me of those hi-res ports of old console titles, in an ajar way.
- evnix 4y agoapart from games going from 2k to 4k to 8k, there hasn't been any noticeable improvement in realism in the past 10 years. ray tracing if enabled looks nice but that's pretty much the height of it, characters look just as janky as they did 10 years ago. I feel the primary reason are the consoles, game devs can't push the boundaries as most consoles are around 5-6 years behind gaming PCs.
- retSava 4y agoHave you played The Last of Us part 2? The amount of details all over the world, smooth animations that blend midway into another, etc, really is a step forward imo.
- dagmx 4y agoI think your comment is wrong and perhaps speaks to your own visual senses than any factual effect. There’s been so many advancements in the last ten years outside of raytracing. Better character motion, better character AI, spatial audio, audio materials, speech matching just off the top of my head. Every single thing about games has gotten noticeably better for realism. One only needs to watch a Digital Foundry video or a GDC talk to see the big uplifts. 10 years is a long time too and spans all the way back to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. So your comment is nonsensical at best
- jokethrowaway 4y agocharacter motion being the same old animations, just done/interpolated better the only advancement I know of which got close to be implemented in games is https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation https://github.com/sebastianstarke/AI4Animation (I think Sebastian worked with EA or some other big company at some point) - still haven't played anything using this though
- philliphaydon 4y agoI remember back in 2000s when Cellfactor demo came out on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIHI7y4ZG4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIHI7y4ZG4 Which needed that separate physx card at the time. Wonder what ever happened to it.
- debug-desperado 4y agoI seem to get unpredictable, if infrequent, hard crashing when playing the PhyX-enabled game Control unless I set the Nvidia control panel option to run the physics on the CPU. System event viewer pointed to a failed assertion in the Nvidia driver. I'm not 100% sure this has fixed the problem but I haven't seen a crash since the change. Since gfx benchmarking is stable and MemTest86 never found anything, the only other culprit would be power transients. I'm using a relatively modest 200 watt RTX 3060 ti so I hope it wouldn't be that. Just wanted to bring this up because I'm not the only one that has experienced this, it was a recommendation from a Steam discussion. And by hard system crash I mean full system reboot.
- mmahemoff 4y agoNow they should reach for the stars and update the README with a project description.
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- speps 4y agoNote this isn't really fully open source as the CUDA kernels for PhysX aren't distributed and the HLSL code for Flow isn't included either (only Vulkan and DX12 bytecode is included, no sources). Happy to be wrong if someone finds the code for these :)
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- arnau147 4y ago[dead]
- uwuemu 4y agoNot to be THAT guy, but Physx is basically reaching EOL. I'm sure a few mid sized studios who want to roll their own engine can still take advantage of the core, but with UE5 completely replacing Physx with Chaos and the "ballast" around the core (Blast/Flex...) being as useless as ever, I don't see the Physx adoption increasing.
- coolspot 4y agoI believe NVidia develops PhysX mostly for robotic/metaverse simulation, not for games. See positioning of NVidia Omniverse for example.