• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Did/Does Nvidia pay games developers to use PhysX?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

magellan

Member
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
I've noticed that PhysX seems to be a dead issue -- even though Nvidia has been pushing
it for years now. It's use seems to be petering out.

Did Nvidia in some way bribe/remunerate games developers to use PhysX in the 1st
place?
 
I think it looks more like game developers have to pay to use some technology but I'm not sure how it looks like with physx. In most cases physx is not giving as good results as all wish and it's a lot of work to add it to the games. Looking how badly designed are most games lately or how developers are cutting costs, I just think it's not worth to use physx. Some effects can be generated without physx or look like physics but are just standard animation. It's not the same but most gamers don't care and when there is no special difference for most gamers then noone cares to pay additional money to add it.
Personally I wouldn't care about physx when most new games last for 2 evenings and only single titles ( like 2-3 per year ) are worth to spend more time. Most of the games that last for longer are online games where barely anyone cares about really high graphics details but all wish to have no lag and higher FPS. In mmorpg or strategy series there is even no point to use physics as you hit other characters or units while background is just static texture.

I'm not sure if I'm getting older or what but I just see that each year games market is getting worse. We look more at the games than play them and gameplay is generally shorter each year. Many games last 4-5 hours and if it's not designed for multiplayer ( online or cooperative ) then we are moving to other game really quick. Exception are some strategy games but in last years there are almost no games like that.
 
Last edited:
Guaranteed Nvidia does something for certain game dev's to add physics support and nvidia optimizations "the way its meant to be played "ring any bells?
Now whether that's paying them outright or under the table or some other way who knows.
But its obvious these things happen when games like Metro Last light come out with Memory leaks that make the game drop to 1fps with AMD video cards - and just to be clear it was still unplayable months and months after its release.

AMD stated that 4A Games flat out refused to work with them at all on the project and it shows.

At the time i had a 7970 in my rig and i ended up finishing the game on my msi laptop lol because i was getting much more consistent fps on the laptop's 770M gpu , rather then my 7970 dropping to staggering 1-5fps areas.

So my point here is you can bet that Nvidia puts large incentives for exclusive development rights in some way shape or form and that includes getting physx injected into games.
 
Game developers pay to use PhysX.

I have worked at both Capcom (as a developer on a game that used PhysX) and NVIDIA.

I have never heard of the kind of conspiracy like intentionally breaking games for AMD GPUs.

Obviously there is marketing and sponsorship stuff ("the way it's meant to be played"), but no game developer would intentionally break their game on AMD GPUs to please NVIDIA. AMD market share is something like 40% in discrete GPUs. NVIDIA would have to pay game companies 40% of their revenue on a game. NVIDIA is not quite THAT rich.

Some games are more optimized for one over the other, and there are many reasons for that (different driver implementations, missing functions, developers predominantly use 1 company's GPU, etc), but I have never heard of intentional breaking.
 
Game developers pay to use PhysX.

That's interesting. So does Nvidia market PhysX as an alternative
to other physics engines like Havok or Euphoria? Is the licensing
of Nvidia's PhysX physics engine cheaper than the alternatives?
How does it stack up in terms of features and performance when
compared to Euphora or Havok?
 
That's interesting. So does Nvidia market PhysX as an alternative
to other physics engines like Havok or Euphoria? Is the licensing
of Nvidia's PhysX physics engine cheaper than the alternatives?
How does it stack up in terms of features and performance when
compared to Euphora or Havok?

Aah sorry it looks like I just had a brain fart. Or maybe it was different back in the days? It's been a few years.

It looks like PhysX is (at least now) free, as long as developers don't need access to the SDK source code (to tweak PhysX itself). They only have to pay if they do want to tweak.

I believe it is supposed to do the same thing as other middleware like Havok. I'm not sure how they compare functionality-wise. I have never actually worked with either library.

I am not familiar with Euphoria. From Wikipedia it sounds like it's more focused on character animation? It doesn't sound like it's really a physics engine.
 
Back