Mafia II Benchmark video featuring NVIDIA PhysX comparison by nvidia

Official PhysX comparison video for Mafia II. Initial video sequence is nothing special (just benchmark run), but composing level makes me envious

Cryostasis BFG Ageia PPU PhysX Test by TRStrider74

This video is comparing Cryostasis PhysX performance with/without additional Ageia PhysX card and main ATI GPU. After watching this I’ve moved Cryostasis to GPU/PPU games section, as it seems to run well enough.

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Autodesk has announced today, that  2.x PhysX plug-in for 3ds Max is going to be included into Subscription Advantage Pack for 3ds Max 2011 and 3ds Max Design 2011.

Description:

Create more compelling, dynamic rigid-body simulations directly in the 3ds Max viewport. The multi-threaded NVIDIA® PhysX® engine supports static, dynamic, and kinematic rigid bodies (the latter for rag doll simulations), and a number of constraints: Rigid, Slide, Hinge, Twist, Universal, Ball & Socket, and Gear.

Animators can more quickly create a wider range of realistic dynamic simulations, and can also use the toolset for modeling: for example, creating a randomly placed landscape of rocks. Assigning physical properties – friction, density, and bounciness – is as simple as choosing from a set of initial preset real-world materials and tweaking parameters as required.

Update: Intesting details were revealed by Kenneth Pimentel, Director of Visual Communications Solutions at Autodesk, on CGTalk.com forums

We can also announce an ongoing partnership with nvidia around PhysX. We entered into the partnership a little late to show much results in this pass, but the partnership is significant and on-going. I think you’d be surprised at the number of research threads we’ve kicked off together.

This is specifically to avoid what happened with Reactor. I think we learned our lesson.

PhysX SDK as default physics solution for most Autodesk products ? Why not

And yet another PhysX article has arrived today – this particular one from PClab.pl is mostly focused on GPU PhysX effects analysis and comparison.

Almost every single modern title with hardware accelerated PhysX content (except for Sacred 2 and Darkest of Days) was reviewed, and detailed description of extra PhysX content both in form of text and comparison videos were included. For example:

Mafia II

Batman: Arkham Asylum

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Interesting technical article, called “PhysX: Lust, Last oder Frust?” has emerged on Tom’sHardware.de today. It’s purpose is to revisit recent events in GPU PhysX (and CPU execution of PhysX effects) area – thus, basic knowledge of this topic is required.

Update: english version available

x87 vs SSE question gets updated with new CPU instructions tests of Mafia II:

(note: graph is called "vtune_metro2033", so some mistakes may take place)

As new PhysX SDK 2.8.4 with SSE2 compliler option is yet in beta, and Mafia II is based on SDK 2.8.3 – it is still relying on x87 instruction set.

Author correctly remarks, that moving from X87 to SSE usage won’t magically boost performance by 2x times, like several websites are promising, more likely 10-20 % or even less in real applications.

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