John Carmack on hardware accelerated (GPU) PhysX

John Carmack is answering a question on hardware accelerated PhysX (running on GPU) during QuakeCon 2009.

Interesting discussion on this video (bluesnews.com):
http://bit.ly/c3PsQX

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• John
• Carmack
• physx
• quakecon
• august
• 2009
• nvidia
• physics
• physix
• api
• gpu
• hardware
• accelerated
• acceleration
• ati
• graphics
• video card
• quake
• doom
• rage
• amd
• intel
• game
• computer
• gameplay
• 3d
• render

[blake3443]

PhysX would be fine if they didn't use x87 instruction set (which runs horribly on x86 CPUs) and oh i don't know used something that x86 was good at (i.e. SSE etc etc)

[BCEMCOCATb]

@blake3443 he talks about HW accelerated PhysX.

What you are talking is software PhysX and it is really good. As you said, it lacks optimization, but it is free for developers and it is pretty powerful in terms of easiness of use and what can be achieved.

[SamSpade2010]

Long-term, hardware is obviously the way to go because the algorithms are intrinsically parallel.

[BCEMCOCATb]

@SamSpade2010. Physics algorithms can use hardware, but it won't be a dedicated hardware nor close standard like PhysX that will gain any popularity. I don't see developers spending time and money to feed the growth of inhomogeneous platform in the future, as they try to develop game on the common-denominator configuration.

Multicore CPUs with more advanced FPUs is the way to go with game physics.

Ofc there will be games that support HW based physics, but only as a gimmick.

[elpolentatlp]

@BCEMCOCATb I don't understand how that's related to what's going on right now. IT seems obvious to me that when nVidia tells you to buy a physx card they tell you to do so, so you can run the current games out there that use physx. If something else is used in the future, cool, it's not going to matter because in that future none of our current hardware will be useful anymore. It's as if I regretted buying my SNES now that I have a DX11 card.

[BCEMCOCATb]

@elpolentatlp imagine if your SNES had only 5 games released total and they didn't much vary from your older NES. That is what Hardware Accelerated PhysX is about. Read the comments for further explanation.

[Hirnlego999]

I won't bother with any hardware physics as long as its only accessible through one brand.

[Foxynews]

if nvidia is smart PhysX should be made open-source and supported via OpenCL.

as a middleware it's a bad idea.

opensource the bastard and get on with it!

[abram730]

I like the idea of not needing to toss out a video card and use that for processing power... as to the original physx card... yep.. people got burned on that one.

I also like the idea of project denver on an nvidia graphics card.. There are lots of possibilities without the bus in the way.. run the renderer on the graphics card.. almost no hit from physx.. physics/3d sound system.. better performence from GPGPU on smaller data chunks.

[Aciddaggerr]

This guy can talk for hours.

[88Cortex]

@SamSpade2010 Long-therm hard ware is the way to go? I'll tell you this :) :

Long-term, there will be only ONE piece of hardware on Earth! We will all use it.

To be less abstract; software will run on as SMALL as possible hardware on clients, and big calculations ETC will go in the cloud, a.k.a. they will be done FOR you by a 3rd side.

[PharrisCo001]

Finally I get to hear the famous "mmmm" grunt that John makes. He's gotin' much better in the latest interviews I've seen. I can just imagine what he talked like when he was makin' Doom with Romero or even Commander Keen.

[MrDevlance]

The guy knows what he is talking.

If ww3 came, I would want to be somewhere near where this guy is!

[xXEnkeixpressXx]

The audience should be bending down & worshipping this man.