Why is Nvidia Physx software so crap?

[alienware]

Gawd.

Last week I sold a 3870x2 to a pal of mine up in Manchester. He got it and installed it.

He then fitted his 9800GT into the next available slot and installed the Nvidia drivers (this was long after doing a driversweep).

So he runs Fluidmark after running GenL and it refused to boot. Windows reported that an error had occured and this proggy would now close, ETC.

Physx was installed and so were all the drivers. It had all been done properly. So I asked him to run Mafia II demo (or the full game he has both) and bench it. Sadly when he enabled Physx it was apparent that it wasn't working.

After many hours of head scratching I told him to remove Physx, rerun driver sweeper and then reinstall it. After all of that it finally worked.

Today my 240GT came and I wanted to test it properly before leaving feedback. I already had an Nvidia card in there so it was a simple case of plugging it in. I had no physx software on there as it is a media PC and uses a GF 6200LE so I installed a later driver with Physx in AND THEN installed the latest Physx so I could run mafia.

Fluidmark was crashing on initialise so I thought sod it, run Furmark. Furmark was fine.

Then I tried to run Mafia 2. Every time I tried it said it was installing Physx but nothing happened. I checked in my device manager remove proggys and sure enough, there were three different versions of Physx. So I know it was installed.

After about an hour I remembered what had happened to my mate so I ran driver sweeper AGAIN and then reinstalled everything one at a time. First reboot I got a bloody BSOD

Finally I installed Physx AGAIN for the third time and it finally worked.

But how buggy and crap is that? Those sort of results you shouldn't be able to replicate if you tried, yet, it's now happened ruddy twice.

Not a very good advertisement is it?

 

[zak4994]

I've never had a bad experience with PhsyX installation.

You were probably unlucky.

 

[alienware]

Well they say lightning never strikes twice.. But it has. Twice in a week, me and my mate.

 

[SiN]

I don't really see a reason for PhysX, it's not that great.

It's really all hype from Nvidia.

 

[alienware]

Well of course, and like Intel/ATI's Havok it could very easily be optimised and done by the CPU.

 

[zak4994]

Well of course, and like Intel/ATI's Havok it could very easily be optimised and done by the CPU.

I thought the whole point of PhysX and such was to offload it from the CPU?

 

[AMDFTW]

it was,but the CPU can handle it quite easy especialy quads,i mean what games use 100% of the CPU or even 60%

i think bioshock 2 was the first for me

 

[Runebeard]

The new beta drivers from Nvidia are much better than old ones if you can get them. They now negate the need for driver sweeper and come with other stuff like PhysX and 3D vision now built-in making it way less hassle. Using this my comp booted 1st time and ran every PhysX game I have no problem on my GTX275. Also, on a side note, sure PhysX is quiet gimmicky, but if you play with it and then without it, you can definitely feel there's something missing, especially on atmospheric games like Arkham Asylum and Metro 2033.

 

[alienware]

I thought the whole point of PhysX and such was to offload it from the CPU?

The whole point of Physx was to make money out of a physics engine. Ageia tried it and realised that it wasn't going to make enough money to keep them afloat and like many of the other hair brained money wasting schemes Nvidia decided to give it a go.

It is nothing that can not be done easily by a CPU. Right now if you try to run it from a CPU it will destroy your performance but only because it is not optimised.

Havok was exactly the same. In around 2005ish when Ageia designed Physx and started marketting it ATI (then owned by ATI) and Intel decided to develop a rival to it (as Nvidia had taken interest in Physx). However after a while they realised it was a total bust because it was nothing a CPU couldn't do easily. CPUs are amazingly underused in games as it is, so there was no point in spending millions of dollars to go to production with snake oil. They had sense....

If you load up Just Cause 2 for example you'll note the logo all over it. That uses Havok and has more physics in it than any other game I have seen yet is easy to get running if you have enough GPU grunt.

 

[KING_OF_SAND]

iv never had a problem with physx with my 5870. and physx isnt hype from nvidia, when ati released "eye finity" nvidia people were saying the same thing. physx is amazing, the only draw back to it is its so expensive to develop with. i have not seen another physics engine render physics better. nothing from Havok, nor Crytek. Blender is about as close as i seen.