PlayStation 4 (codename Orbis) technical hardware investigation (news and rumours)
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ShadowRunner
Veteran
No reason gpgpu couldnt be used, wasn't physx originally design for running on gpus from the get go? I know it it was proprietary for nvidia gpus but no reason the calculations wouldnt work just as well on amd hardware if allowed, doubt they would prevent it it would give them an advantage in the pc arena if it gained widespread use and stayed proprietary there.
Because the game is scary enough to make you crap yourself?
No sh*t. 8^d
Actually, I have been backstabbed, pushed off a cliff, poisoned, mauled, burnt alive, pierced by magical spears, fell into a hole accidentally, sat on by some dragon or giant so many times that it's business as usual these days.
Yap, looking forward to try something like this. I probably won't use head tracking to control the entire camera though. I think I prefer to use the right stick to control the camera, and head tracking to survey (look up, down, left, right) the current camera view.
That way I don't have to do a 360 turn anywhere.
Nvidia isn't going to make physx run on a radeon unless physx complies with dx11 or something and its a simple change. As far as I know, the API is distinct and uses its own paths. It runs horrible on a cpu but at learn nvidia doesn't have to any work to get it running.
The main thing is, why would devs want to use physx in the first place when they can use what ever AMD provides.
They didn't make fine grain distinctions based on functionality which seems to be causing some confusion. I presented three categories based on how they work and not a marketing message. For example, I think for clarity sake we should only use the word "Gaikai" to refer to cloud rendered games. While Dave Perry says the Gaikai technologies and expertise informed the video streaming capabilities of the PS4, Sony is still using Gaikai to specifically refer to their cloud-based services.
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/showpost.php?p=2860705&postcount=20
confirmed to be only cpu physx.
confirmed to be only cpu physx.
Originally it was designed for CPU and a custom accelerator, the Physics Processing Unit. It was a good fit for GPU though (reportedly, although I do wonder if that's a subset of the original physics?) and nVidia bought PhysX and withheld it for business reasons. It could be ported, but nVidia won't allow it as it gives their GPUs an advantage. Although not if other devs don't use it. All we need is a 3rd party physics lib like Havok to get a GPU port and PhysX will be undone.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Oh how it must gall them to support a system with AMD behind the GPGPU which means...
Is Nvidia angling to win more PC marketshare by hoping console game devs ingrain physx deeply into their games, whilst still holding physx exclusive to their own cards in PC market space?
I wouldn't count it beyond them to do something like that. Proprietary was only a bad thing when it was 3dfx who was trying to corner the gaming market...
They can hope all they want but...
Nvidia who claims that PhysX is reliant on CUDA (well obviously since they themselves limit it to that for competitive reasons) isn't about to port it to GCN unless they are forced to.
And I believe Havok has already stated as well as demo'd in the PS4 reveal, that they will be taking advantage of GPGPU on PS4. Something they couldn't quite do on PC due to the PCIE interface with the graphics card.
Not only that but they deliberately castrate the CPU version on PC compared to consoles. A few years back someone showed that the CPU version was limited to one thread and didn't use any modern SIMD extensions (SSE3 for example). I believe at most it used old MMX instructions at the time. It wasn't until this came out that they grudgingly allowed for more CPU cores to be used, but then made it quite difficult to use them.
I've since stopped paying attention to PhysX, so maybe things have changed for the better in the past year, but I'm not holding my breath.
They'll likely optimize it quite well for the CPU on consoles but not allow those same optimizations to be used on the PC in order to keep it artificially slow on PC. But perhaps I'm being too cynical and Nvidia have changed their business philosophy with regards to PhysX.
Which means smaller developers who maybe can't afford to license Havok may use it, but I can't see the larger studios choosing to use PhysX over Havok at that point. I'd imagine the Bullet physics library will also take advantage of GPGPU on consoles. It is open source so could be a more attractive solution over PhysX for those that can't afford to license Havok.
Regards,
SB
Oh how it must gall them to support a system with AMD behind the GPGPU which means...
They can hope all they want but...
Nvidia who claims that PhysX is reliant on CUDA (well obviously since they themselves limit it to that for competitive reasons) isn't about to port it to GCN unless they are forced to.
And I believe Havok has already stated as well as demo'd in the PS4 reveal, that they will be taking advantage of GPGPU on PS4. Something they couldn't quite do on PC due to the PCIE interface with the graphics card.
Not only that but they deliberately castrate the CPU version on PC compared to consoles. A few years back someone showed that the CPU version was limited to one thread and didn't use any modern SIMD extensions (SSE3 for example). I believe at most it used old MMX instructions at the time. It wasn't until this came out that they grudgingly allowed for more CPU cores to be used, but then made it quite difficult to use them.
I've since stopped paying attention to PhysX, so maybe things have changed for the better in the past year, but I'm not holding my breath.
They'll likely optimize it quite well for the CPU on consoles but not allow those same optimizations to be used on the PC in order to keep it artificially slow on PC. But perhaps I'm being too cynical and Nvidia have changed their business philosophy with regards to PhysX.
Which means smaller developers who maybe can't afford to license Havok may use it, but I can't see the larger studios choosing to use PhysX over Havok at that point. I'd imagine the Bullet physics library will also take advantage of GPGPU on consoles. It is open source so could be a more attractive solution over PhysX for those that can't afford to license Havok.
Regards,
SB
Havok is free for PC games that are cheaper than $10: http://software.intel.com/sites/havok/en/
Why does anyone use it then? There are plenty of other options that'll run better on any PC that's not using an nVidia GPU. I'd have thought PhysX would have naturally died from being too limited. Portability is much more important, and Havok seems to be a strong option.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I imagine support is probably good. Nvidia have a good developer relations team.
As well on the PC side to push GPU accelerated PhysX, Nvidia will generally do all the work for the developer as well as sometimes kicking in some money towards development.
And as I mentioned before it's free to developers. It seems Havok may have taken notice as it appears to be free to very low budget devs as dagamer points out. That doesn't help those with smaller budgets developing titles in the 11+ USD range, however.
And while Bullet is open source, I'd imagine that developer support isn't nearly as strong. It is open source after all.
And then you have some developers opting to roll their own physics solutions (Crytek and Blizzard for example who both used to use Havok I believe).
Regards,
SB
VERY good developer relations... and besides "its the way it's meant to be played" (TM)
Nvidia is very smart, by having developers optimize for their hardware, it gives them an edge. I makes sense from a business side of things to "support" Physx on platforms that even don't have Nvidia GPU's because it makes the games compatible on any system, but runs best ("the way it's meant to be played" or... properly) on Nvidia GPUs.
For the PS4, any game engine that already is using Physx, having the support will be nice, but obviously won't do anything amazing with the limited CPU resources, though at least the GPU can be dedicated to GPU tasks.
For games that want to go "next gen" on the physics side of things, havok, or other solutions that make use of the GPU will be a nessesity... unless Nvidia drops the bomb and supports the PS4's GPU.
Silent_Bhudda, I am not a big fan of NVidia, but in the olden days of the GC, Xbox and PS2 era they provided the Xbox with a nice piece of hardware, I wouldn't mind them making a GPU for a next gen console, but that's not the case.
On a different note, according to developers, when Sony dropped the bomb regarding the great addition of 8GB RAM GDDR5, they did the right thing.
Dishonoured developers couldn't be happier with the change.
This is shaping up to be the best generation ever!!
Full news here.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013...mory-is-a-joy-says-dishonored-level-designer/
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013...mory-is-a-joy-says-dishonored-level-designer/
On a different note, according to developers, when Sony dropped the bomb regarding the great addition of 8GB RAM GDDR5, they did the right thing.
Dishonoured developers couldn't be happier with the change.
This is shaping up to be the best generation ever!!
Full news here.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013...mory-is-a-joy-says-dishonored-level-designer/
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2013...mory-is-a-joy-says-dishonored-level-designer/
Some of you may stone me, but what kind of game is "Dishonored" ? Is it well regarded ?
EDIT:
I see where you are coming from.
At this point, I am just assuming RemotePlay is that Vita-PS4 wireless play feature.
For PS4's "Let me take control" feature, it would be poor form if they simply rely on a straight peer-to-peer WAN RemotePlay implementation. Besides network latency and performance issues, they also need to worry about firewall configs.
At the minimal, they should send the game saves to the helper. Let that dude stream his game session back to the guy asking for help (for spectating). This assumes that the helper has a copy of the game.
I don't mind a paid server setup either since the performance should be better. And they can potentially stack more value added services on top.
EDIT:
I see where you are coming from.
At this point, I am just assuming RemotePlay is that Vita-PS4 wireless play feature.
For PS4's "Let me take control" feature, it would be poor form if they simply rely on a straight peer-to-peer WAN RemotePlay implementation. Besides network latency and performance issues, they also need to worry about firewall configs.
At the minimal, they should send the game saves to the helper. Let that dude stream his game session back to the guy asking for help (for spectating). This assumes that the helper has a copy of the game.
I don't mind a paid server setup either since the performance should be better. And they can potentially stack more value added services on top.
I'm interested in how you see it being done, given that from the description you can be playing locally then hand the controller over to a "remote" friend.
Are you suggesting some sort of hand off to Gaikai, exactly how would this work, how much state would you have to transmit from the client?
Are you suggesting that you can only hand off control at specific points?
I'm just wondering what you see the alternative as.
I concur. The only logical option is for a remote play to access the game on the system that is being played. To access it via a server would need the game to be loaded and the state completely copied over. Far easier to implement Remote Play as is on PSP/Vita on arbitrary devices afforded permission.
That seems incredibly unlikely. The peer-to-peer streaming seems to be the easiest and best way to handle it.
It is easier to use RemotePlay “as is” but I think the end result would be terrible.
The problem is easier to solve if both gamers have a copy of the game. Then it would be like (peer to peer) co-op. The state is shared for both players. e.g., In the Souls games, I get summoned to someone’s world to help clear a level. When I arrived at his world, all the existing corpses, and item drops are visible to me. Sometimes, the lag is as long as 1-2 seconds, or I get disconnected halfway. Sometimes, I see people teleporting all over the place. Most of the time, I could get by but I do have to adjust for the lag (i.e., swing weapon earlier).
If they use RemotePlay across WAN, they will have to stream the game visual upstream from the host over to the helper, I doubt the result will be acceptable. Try using PSP RemotePlay (only 480x272 over 802.11b) from an external access point.
If they want to solve this via a server approach, then they will have to borrow the instant game demo infrastructure. In David Perry’s presentation, he mentioned that these Gaikai demoes are not crippled (to fit download size). I assume they are using the full game on these servers.
The transition won’t be seamless. Easiest is to let the host save the game. Start a Gaikai session automatically at the saved point, and send an invitation to the helper. Both will continue in the shared Gaikai streamed world.
On the topic of helping someone clear a level... in a more complex game, I imagine we may have to leave or restart the current level too.
David Perry also talks about Directing a level (e.g., dropping health potion and items, marking up spots in the level). For that feature, a RemotePlay style approach may work better. In fact, they don’t really need RemotePlay if the helper has a copy of the game. They can use the existing PSN player publishing feature to do so (e.g., In Demon’s Souls you leave in-game clues/messages, and also your “ghosts” in someone else’s world. Or you sabotage his world by dying in the same area).
The problem is easier to solve if both gamers have a copy of the game. Then it would be like (peer to peer) co-op. The state is shared for both players. e.g., In the Souls games, I get summoned to someone’s world to help clear a level. When I arrived at his world, all the existing corpses, and item drops are visible to me. Sometimes, the lag is as long as 1-2 seconds, or I get disconnected halfway. Sometimes, I see people teleporting all over the place. Most of the time, I could get by but I do have to adjust for the lag (i.e., swing weapon earlier).
If they use RemotePlay across WAN, they will have to stream the game visual upstream from the host over to the helper, I doubt the result will be acceptable. Try using PSP RemotePlay (only 480x272 over 802.11b) from an external access point.
If they want to solve this via a server approach, then they will have to borrow the instant game demo infrastructure. In David Perry’s presentation, he mentioned that these Gaikai demoes are not crippled (to fit download size). I assume they are using the full game on these servers.
The transition won’t be seamless. Easiest is to let the host save the game. Start a Gaikai session automatically at the saved point, and send an invitation to the helper. Both will continue in the shared Gaikai streamed world.
On the topic of helping someone clear a level... in a more complex game, I imagine we may have to leave or restart the current level too.
David Perry also talks about Directing a level (e.g., dropping health potion and items, marking up spots in the level). For that feature, a RemotePlay style approach may work better. In fact, they don’t really need RemotePlay if the helper has a copy of the game. They can use the existing PSN player publishing feature to do so (e.g., In Demon’s Souls you leave in-game clues/messages, and also your “ghosts” in someone else’s world. Or you sabotage his world by dying in the same area).
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