YoGi-Sama
Skilled
@Raghu: Okay... so I stand corrected. I guess I mis-interpreted Physx libraries being open to use for commercial/non-commercial purposes, to being open source.
Yes, I do feel nVidia is pushing more and more towards GPGPU applications and have made significant progress in that area. Although we are yet to see worthy GPGPU apps for day-to-day computing, nVidia has put in lot of effort in wide-spreading CUDA.
But that also is the reason for my worries, that, in the end of the day CUDA is proprietary platform, just as Stream and application written for one will be tied to single vendor. That's why I have high hopes on OpenCL, as it makes it easier for creating vendor agnostic solutions and thus making more and more developers use it.
I've been ATi user for some time now, and I'm quite happy with it's performance in games. But the whole idea of using GPU for more than just games does sound enticing. Moreover, now we have good enough video players which can use GPU for video decoding and even our computing interfaces (Windows Aero, OSX GUI, Ubuntu's Beryl(?) interface) are leveraging GPUs for responsiveness and acceleration. I would love to see more and more general computing apps leveraging idle power of GPU. Recently I even bought a RAW file viewer (FastPictureViewer) that can use GPU for image viewing and zooming operations. I'll be keeping a close watch on Fermi's development, but I just hope that they price it right and at least have varied SKUs for different budget segments. Otherwise, I'll be picking up another ATi card. Afterall, we all want to play games.
@atiamd: I don't think looking better has anything to do with physics engine being used. Physics engines such as Physx or Havok add more realism to game by making environments behave as close as real life. Stuff bouncing off the surfaces like wall or floor like it would do in real life or shooting the enemy and watching him fall like real person are kind of stuff physics engine is supposed to take care of.
The key difference is, who or what does all this physics processing. Running it off the CPU isn't the best way as it creates significant impact on gameplay performance. GPUs on the other hand, have massive number of parallel processors which can run this task with minimal impact on framerates. At least that's the basic idea behind running GPU bound physics processing engine. Having said that, a well coded game in Havok is going to look almost as good as Physx, but while Havok will strain your CPU as complexity in physics processing increases, Physx will be able to keep performance hit minimal as it will use your GPU for the job.
Yes, I do feel nVidia is pushing more and more towards GPGPU applications and have made significant progress in that area. Although we are yet to see worthy GPGPU apps for day-to-day computing, nVidia has put in lot of effort in wide-spreading CUDA.
But that also is the reason for my worries, that, in the end of the day CUDA is proprietary platform, just as Stream and application written for one will be tied to single vendor. That's why I have high hopes on OpenCL, as it makes it easier for creating vendor agnostic solutions and thus making more and more developers use it.
I've been ATi user for some time now, and I'm quite happy with it's performance in games. But the whole idea of using GPU for more than just games does sound enticing. Moreover, now we have good enough video players which can use GPU for video decoding and even our computing interfaces (Windows Aero, OSX GUI, Ubuntu's Beryl(?) interface) are leveraging GPUs for responsiveness and acceleration. I would love to see more and more general computing apps leveraging idle power of GPU. Recently I even bought a RAW file viewer (FastPictureViewer) that can use GPU for image viewing and zooming operations. I'll be keeping a close watch on Fermi's development, but I just hope that they price it right and at least have varied SKUs for different budget segments. Otherwise, I'll be picking up another ATi card. Afterall, we all want to play games.
@atiamd: I don't think looking better has anything to do with physics engine being used. Physics engines such as Physx or Havok add more realism to game by making environments behave as close as real life. Stuff bouncing off the surfaces like wall or floor like it would do in real life or shooting the enemy and watching him fall like real person are kind of stuff physics engine is supposed to take care of.
The key difference is, who or what does all this physics processing. Running it off the CPU isn't the best way as it creates significant impact on gameplay performance. GPUs on the other hand, have massive number of parallel processors which can run this task with minimal impact on framerates. At least that's the basic idea behind running GPU bound physics processing engine. Having said that, a well coded game in Havok is going to look almost as good as Physx, but while Havok will strain your CPU as complexity in physics processing increases, Physx will be able to keep performance hit minimal as it will use your GPU for the job.
