Exclusive: An Atomic talk with engineers from the world’s biggest graphics companies, as we find out whose API is top dog.
The Game Developers Conference is typically an event packed with technological and software innovation; showcasing the up-and-coming new tech as well as existing technologies, albeit in a heavily tweaked form. However, GDC 2010 brought about some controversy between the world's largest graphics manufacturers, as AMD's Worldwide Developer Relations Manager Richard Huddy spoke out against rival company NVIDIA.
In an interview with UK site THINQ, Richard commented on NVIDIA's work with games developers: "What I've seen with physics, or PhysX rather, is that Nvidia create a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game". This comment certainly implies that the physics game is afoot, so with the competition heating up over the recent wave of new graphics technologies such as AMD's Bullet, and NVIDIA's PhysX, we tumbled down the rabbit hole of physics simulation to find out what the real story was.
When we asked for a counter-comment from NVIDIA about Richard's GDC interview we got ahold of both Ashu Rege, Senior Director of Content and Technology, and Nadeem Mohammad, Director of Product Management and PhysX. Supporting AMD was in fact Richard Huddy himself, so with each manufacturer represented by high-level staff members, we sat down and posed a question to Ashu and Nadeem; has NVIDIA been paying content developers to include PhysX?
Ashu responds "No, no paying. We haven't given bags of cash to [developers]. NVIDIA's been engaging with [developers] for ages, even before physics. The core of our business is working to make great applications; working with developers is truly critical to us". In fact, Ashu suggests that the use of the PhysX library isn't all that NVIDIA give to developers. "In our product program we put in a lot of investment. We'll work with them to fix their shaders, we'll test [their game] on every piece of hardware we have, and we'll promote it. It brings great value to our users".
However, Richard believes otherwise. Instead of working to help the developers of games to benefit all users, he said that PhysX is a hindrance: "it can be used on the CPU, and you can also use it on the GPU using a stream computer or GPGPU that NVIDIA run in CUDA. If you look at the CPU implementation of PhysX it's typically ok-ish; the comparison of CPU vs GPU is fundamentally interesting to NVIDIA. They are, after all, a GPU company."
Most game titles on the PC platform that support PhysX are still capable of running the library on the processor if no NVIDIA card is available, but in a limited state that runs with a reduced level of realism. Richard highlights Sacred 2 as a classic example, "it runs GPU accelerated PhysX - but if you don't have [an NVIDIA card] it only runs on a single CPU core. When it falls back to the CPU, NVIDIA has absolutely no interest that it runs efficiently. I see no GPU accelerated PhysX game that runs on more than one CPU core".
Ashu responds to the efficiency plainly: "Physics is a whole software package, and has different performance characteristics on different hardware." Nadeem from NVIDIA reckons the benefits of PhysX are clear. "PhysX makes a huge visual difference, and the most excited people every time we talk to a developer are the artists - their vision of what they want to do is always curtailed by the lack of technology". But if Richard thinks that PhysX doesn't offer enough to users, what about AMD's competing solution, Bullet?
Issue: 117 | October, 2010