Nvidia Physx deprecatated in UE 5.0

I miss 3d Vision much more than PhysiX...

I have a 3D monitor that supports it and now it's mostly working as an ordinary monitor.

 

Well, that would make a big difference. My experiences with PhysX were on a single card, usually higher end ones, and the majority of games had stuttering/hitching and/or wildly erratic framerates when using PhysX unless I set them to Low or something (e.g. Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag which had three settings for PhysX).

 

I've had HAGS turned on for a while now, and haven't noticed any obvious issues like stuttering or erratic frame times when gaming, or tangible benefits for that matter. After reading this thread, thought I'd do some PhysX testing of my own, since I have Borderlands 2 installed (Steam).

To make it as clean as possible - no overlays/injectors/frame limiters - VRR and VSync Off - running in Fullscreen with all Graphics options set to HIGH, except FXAA and DoF turned off (never use them). Also PhysX set to HIGH in the BL2 menu. Running @ 3840x1600 so the GPU is getting a workout. Started a new character, ran around the starting area and spun the camera several times to load up the textures. Found a spot where I could look at half a dozen sheets flapping in the wind, and a couple of small fires burning in drums, just outside the hideout.

Now the frame rate is not jerky at all, but there IS a considerable performance hit with HAGS on. ~146 FPS with it off and then ~107 FPS with it on. Just in case there was something funky about this scene, I ran through to the back of the hideout where there's a single fire burning in a barrel. Although the difference is smaller (~170 vs ~150) it's repeatable, as is the other test. Wondering if this is PhysX, CUDA or a combination as @Astyanax mentioned earlier, but I think I'll just leave HAGS turned off for now. Not sure if NVidia needs any more feedback on this issue, but I took a couple of screenshots, and I'll probably send it through anyway.

 

It tanked the FPS in Alice: Madness Returns as well.

 

Version 2.x up until 2.8.4 weren't all that good or maybe it's better to say they've aged less gracefully for modern hardware, 3.x really started to turn it around but since each binary is a separate version (You have quite a few of the old ones in the PhysX installer on it's own though curiously a few have also been omitted even pre-2.7.0 for the legacy pack back with the AGEIA card being a thing.) after that as I remember it really started to improve but also moved some of the distribution to the game and binaries with a few core bits handled by the runtime.

Suppose 4.0 is what we have with UE4 now and Unity, CPU and well optimized with a possibility of extending GPU effects although I don't believe there's any easy way to uplift the earlier versions especially the major differences back with 2.x and a ton of code changes and very early GPU support until I suppose 3.0 was a extensive retooling into newer CUDA code along with further x86 code for the CPU development and performance.


Alice Madness Returns had fantastic cloth and hair physics though, water / goop pseudo-water liquids probably hit framerate like none other though for how to simulate it even somewhat simplified for current GPU hardware.
Particles probably after that and cloth and other stuff can even run on the CPU maybe with some simplification.
(Still better than the early stuff with Cryostasis and some others or the AGEIA demo showcases I suppose.)


EDIT: Or the early ragdoll effects and rigid body physics, smack a small something in the early games using PhysX like Gothic 3 and see the force send the object out like a rubber ball gliding and bouncing or flying way out into the distance.
(Most of that is pre-NVIDIA though like 2.5.0 or before, been a few years since 2007 or so by this point so I don't remember it all too well anymore.)


EDIT: Anyways going to be interesting to see what Chaos can do, new higher-end hardware especially the shift in console capabilities might see physics leveraged for some impressive effects.

 

But how many game titles have implemented Physx in the later 3-4 years? The same you can see with 3D Vision, that is basically legacy now. Cuda still have use in "enterprise" use I think, but Physx for gaming is dying.

Borderlands 2 was one of the few games that really used Physx well. If my memory don't fail me, when Captain Scarlett DLC hit, physx got broken, people complained, Gearbox blamed nVidia, nVidia blamed Gearbox, and looks like it is still broke nowadays, even in modern much more powerful hardware. Please correct me if i'm wrong in this part.

 

I played Killing floor 2 with hw physx and same 45-50fps drops, by fluid smoke explosions, and gpu usage dropped to 50%.. thought the dev fixed it by now, but nope.

 

Havok > PhysX

Always has been this way. PhysX sure was more advanced with fluid and cloth simulation but it always looked out of place like in Borderlands 2 or it just didn't add much if anything to the game world.

I wass one of those idiots who brought a BFG Agesa PhysX card back in the day and was looking forward to this game..... Who remembers it? Only a demo was ever released.



I always preferred Havok as it was super easy on hardware requirements and still gave pretty good results. Oblivion was a game that I remember fondly and seeing an enemies body ragdoll down the side of a mountain and landing at the bottom looked great.

 

How many? A lot. Most of you here are reminiscing about GPU accelerated PhysX, that died years ago. Totally irrelevant. UE is replacing PhysX in it's modern CPU implementation.
As @mbk1969 pointed out, the CPU implementation normally has it's DLL's bundled with the game's files. UE4 also has PhysX built-in and is the default, any game that uses UE4 probably uses PhysX. This is why the OP is relevant.
You've likely played dozens of games using PhysX this past generation without even knowing it.

Despite the amount of you that liked this post...

It's also just completely wrong.

 

Thanks for that list. Several of those titles I still have installed, and a couple of them I've played recently and still do.

I'm going to have another crack at Borderlands 2 running PhysX on the CPU this time, with HAGS On again, just to see what happens. As per my test above, HAGS "caused" a massive FPS hit in BL2 when PhysX was on the GPU.

 

That list is also far from comprehensive. For example Gears 5, which uses UE4, which uses PhysX, is not listed. I'm pretty sure they gave up with the list because UE4 is so popular. It's also worth noting Unity uses PhysX, so even after UE moves on, PhysX is not dead.

 

I still play Gears 4 & 5 Co-op with a buddy, and several Unity titles in my library as well, so good to know.

Interesting results re Borderlands 2 with PhysX set to run on the CPU via NV Control Panel. (Earlier test was: GPU PhysX / HAGS Off ~146 fps / HAGS On ~107 fps)

With CPU PhysX, turning HAGS On or Off is no longer impacting the frame rate, in fact there's been a slight increase. Now I'm getting ~ 157 FPS in the same game scene for both cases.

I ran the test a couple of times to be sure, and it's the same result. PhysX is now greyed out in the BL2 Options, though still set to HIGH. It must be still working because the snow storms are coming through, the sheets are still flapping in the wind and fires still burning. Before when I was experimenting with PhysX settings, picking LOW in Options would completely cull the sheets from the scene. (I just can't change the setting without going back to NVCP and reverting PhysX to the GPU)

Very interesting indeed, as I've always let PhysX default to the GPU in the past, as it does with every new driver install. I'm almost always GPU bound (resolution/quality settings) and that's just fine, so offloading the PhysX to the CPU (2700X) actually makes sense in my case. Never thought twice about it until now. More game testing to do! =)

 

3D gaming is dead, unleass VR.
This is really a shame cause the experience in a lot of games it's really immersive!

 

Gearbox used an uncapped particle limit and ramped up the amount of physx they were implementing in the subsequent DLC's, the performance hits were 100% gearbox's fault.

 

You can use 3dfixmanager from Helix mods. I recently played Jouney in 3D and it was a blast.

 

Borderlands PhysX, besides crippling the framerate due to being tacked onto an engine that can barely handle competent amount of draw calls before it completely goes to s*** all by itself, was basically a middle finger to AMD. You either get a lot of nice looking aesthetic and tons of particle effects with console like performance, or you get an upscaled PS3 game with little to no particles and flat out missing environment details.

F.E.A.R. came out in 2005. Particle and physics wise it s***s all over Borderlands without PhysX and if Gearbox went with a standard non-proprietary physics model, any capable GPU could have virtually indistinguishable from full PhysX effects with much less of a hit to performance.

Blobs of clear jelly coming out of a water pipe don't need heavily calculated paths chewing up resources, they are f***ing unrealistic blobs of jelly coming out of a water pipe, they just need a basic path.

 

Interesting... once i get RTX 3080 FE, i'm gonna test this out (sold RTX 2080 FE can't test this out).

 

And I was one of those idiots that bought several dedicated hardware PhysX cards

My last PhysX card if I remember was a GTX 750 Ti, and it still couldn't give me smooth frames in BL2! But I agree with NeoandGeo that BL2 just couldn't handle the draw calls that PhysX stipulated. If I remember correctly, BL2 was using DX9 so it was all single threaded.

At any rate, hardware accelerated physics is no longer really necessary because modern day multicore CPUs with SMT and wide vectors are more than powerful enough to run even some of the more strenuous physics simulation algorithms like cloth, smoke and fluid without tanking the framerate.

Control is a great example of that. It has cloth and smoke simulation plus plenty of rigid body effects. The next gen games will use physics engines like Epic's new Chaos that have been optimized for AVX2, so it will be even more impressive!

 

Speaking of Borderlands 2, does physx still work when using dxvk, i've seen that framerates go up with it....

 

Yes. Though you currently need to set a config flag to avoid corruption:
https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/pull/1678
And should disable SSAO as well (no big loss).
UE3 + DXVK can be difficult with 32 bit address space though.