Personally, I wouldn’t change my choice of cards for a few graphical effects that only a small handful of games implement well enough for me to notice. Getting a cheap old nVidia card for pure physX usage, maybe
PR stuff… did you know that cloth simulation is much older than PhysX?
EDIT: do you know Red Faction 3?
It doesn’t utilize PhysX and you can destroy whole buildings and it runs perfectly fine
If I’m spending 530$+ on a graphics card (unfortunatly we have higher prices than in the US) then I want everything I can get. Also, when I play a game I want to see everything that developers wanted me to see.
pfannkuchen_gesicht, sure, but there’s only one Guerilla and dozens of games that support PhysX. I’m not saying that Nvidia cards are better, actually they have lower performance and cost more but offer some stuff that ATI doesn’t have and that’s why I choose NV 
.
I’d rather have higher performance than PhysX tbh. I think that I enables PhysX in the Mafia 2 demo. It wasn’t unplayable but it did make it a lot harder to play because of the performance impact. I have an ATI card.
This. All the way to end of the world and back
dozens of games that support physx?
really?
I only know a hand full of games which really make use of physx
which ever one comes with my computer
And that’s just now. There’ll be many more.
As for the performance, if you really want everything to be the way it should then you need to throw in extra cash, there’s no other choice…
and less than a half of those games you listed really make use of the physx abilities, the rest could use any other physics engine without any feature cuts in the game.
Why should I throw out extra cash for nvidia if there is a OpenCL based physics engine from Bullet physics in development which is usable on every card?
And again, I haven’t seen a single effect with PhysX which wouldn’t be possible without CUDA.
It’s just not worth to pay much more money just for one single overhyped feature.
Yeah, PhysX is an overrated piece of unoptimized shit. Just a marketing gimmick to sell nvidia cards.
You don’t play with it = you don’t actually know it.
Sure, there might be none. But untill someone starts implementing such effects without PhysX, I’ll be plying the more eye-kandy way ;]
eh, I had a nvidia card, so I know exactly what I’m talking about.
I run both at the same time, but only buy ATi.
What I ment was if you want the shiny-sparkly-detailed game then you need to spend a lot of money to be able to enjoy it and not everyone would like that…
My experience with ATI and Nvidia has proven to me that Nvidia have much better drivers, the ATI drivers I have now (stuck with a shitty ATI 3800) keep crashing at random times.
eh… not really, ATI cards have plenty of raw power, that means that you could easily use PhysX in most physx games with only one single GPU.
No need for an extra card = no extra cash.
But since PhysX is nvdia only it doesn’t matter.
I hope Havok and Bullet get OpenCL support soon, in case of Bullet there are already betas with some nice examples, like physical simulated particles(similar to SPH)
Look through some videos on YT comparing performance between hardware PhysX and it’s software emulation. If it were so easy then Nvidia wouldn’t implement Ageia’s product into their own cards…
who spoke of software emulation?
You can do GPGPU with any current gfx card, not only nv cards.
and it’s not exactly what ageia made, nv ported it over to GPUs,so you don’t need to buy an extra special card just for physics(remember those physx cards?)
Yep, ASUS used to make them for a while but they were way too expensive (at least here). That’s why I like the fact that now I have it for free ;P.
Had an Ati x700 now I have an Nvidia Gtx 460, mid-range all the way…