DavidGraham
Veteran
You need to revise your historical information, this was the old PhysX libraries running on the X87 code path, NVIDIA inherited this from Ageia because most things were single threaded back in the days despite the abundance of multi core CPUs, NVIDIA later developed multi core acceleration and PhysX got picked up to be used in dozens of engines: Unreal, Unity, Northlight (Control), Glacier (Hitman), Crystal (Deus Ex), Luminous (Final Fantasy), RED (Witcher), 4A (Metro), Dunia 2, AnvilNext ..etc.
I remember reading Unity devs clearly stating PhysX was their choice because it's the most stable solution out there.
Surprisingly no, GPU PhsyX is featured in two recent games: Metro Exodus and Atlas, previously GPU accelerated PhysX was restricted to only run through CUDA, later it used DirectCompute, which is available to all GPUs, GPU PhysX kickstarted the concept of using the GPU for physics back when no game dared to do so, right now most games have GPU accelerated particles and other effects through DirectCompute and other alternative APIs.
Most of these things that NVIDIA developed have yet to standardized, and it was never NVIDIA's aim to standardize any of them, they were just advancing graphics/display within their own ecosystem for their customers.
G-Sync is ubiquitous now and is everywhere, despite it being an upgrade over the basic featureless industry standard (VESA). it's an all encompassing solution now, it swallowed FreeSync and became it's own beast, allowing Geforce users to access features not available on other GPUs from other vendors.
TXAA popularized temproal AA, it morphed into TAA later on (without of the MSAA component of TXAA).
HBAO+ is pretty popular and much more widespread than any other SSAO solutions.
Speaking of things that reached standards levels from NVIDIA, I have to mention CUDA, the most widely used API for compute and AI, I also have to mention Optix, the most widely
used API for professional visualization and professional 3D design. I also have to mention Ansel and Highlights, the most widely used photo mode interface on PC.
An honorable mention is 3D vision, it was the only game in town back then before VR replaced all the active 3D glasses.
Of course we now have DLSS, which kickstarted the upscaling revolution on PC, There is also Reflex, the only low latency solution in town.
Just goes to show, cross gen has little to no impact on how good a title can look as long as a studio is willing to put in the work to scale down relevant graphical assets and tech so that it'll run on hardware that is less capable.
