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Malkai Inos
Any Given Day
1343
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Posted - 2014.05.19 23:11:00 -
[1] - Quote
The Dust 514 Graphics Panel from FF2014 contains, among others, early UE3 demos of Nvidia's GPU accelerated physics technology, known as PhysX. The potential benefit to everyday gameplay is obvious. Realistic smoke and particle physics for geater visual fidelity and artistic appeal, Walls of smoke obfuscating view for enhanced tactical gameplay, orbitals that shroud the area in dense fog or mercs that drop into the battlefield with a glorious pillar of dust emerging from the impact zone are just examples of what can be done with this tech.
All of this for rather minor performance impact for Nvidia users since all of that is rendered in hardware on the GPU itself but here comes the major caveat.
Prope-...Porpi-...Pro-prie-tary!
Nvidia PhysX, formerly known as AGEIA PhysX is a Physics Processing Unit (PPU) that was initially sold on a seperate card by creator AGEIA in hopes to establish PPUs as mainstream peripherals just like soundcards and GPUs are today. Unfortunately, limited initial developer interest gave little reason for users to stem the entry cost, which lead to only a small portion of the user base owning PhysX capable hardware which in turn further disincentiviced developers from actually supporting the technology. In the end, PhysX was only supported in a small number of games and PPUs didn't take off the way AGEIA hoped it would as a result.
In comes Nvidia corp. who took over troubled AGEIA along with all patents and technology concerning their PPU concept and used this tech to implement it in a majority of their graphics cards. Today, most owners of a Nvidia branded GPU have PhysX capable hardware in their PCs.
The problem is that not everyone uses Nvidia GPUs thus not everyone supports hardware PhysX. In fact, including Intels iGPUs, both AMD and Nvidia respresent a mere fith of the GPU market, respectively. It goes without saying that most gamers don't use integrated graphics to play games and discrete graphics cards represent a significantly larger portion of EVE: Legion's audience. But even with that said. A significant portion of users does not support PhysX in hardware.
Now, many games that support the tech allow PhysX based physics effects on lower detail levels to be calculated in software i.e. by the CPU instead of the PPU found on nvidia cards. However, for reasons that i'm not entirely knowledgeable about and that would break the scope of this post anyway, CPUs are not quite as efficient with PhysX compared to dedicated hardware leading to greatly reduced detail and/or greatly impacted performance. In the worst case, those fancy smoke and particle physics effects have to be deactivated in part or entirely.
How did he see me!?
What would this mean in EVE: Legion? Walls of smoke obfuscating view...unless you deactivate/don't support PhysX and see right through it. Orbitals that shroud the area, as long as you willingly put yourself to the disadvantage. Pillars of dust that would've hidden your position, had the enemy Physx activated. The list goes on.
Online games require a base line of graphical fidelity that cannot be deactivated before any gameplay affecting effect can be implemented. The first Far Cry game was a good negative example where players would just reduce their graphics options and look right through distant trees and bushes the opponent thought would hide him from view. As a result, then developer crytek forced a certain viewing distance for online play to prevent people from "cheating" with lower graphics options. This effecticely increased the required minimum specs to play the game online, making it unplayable for old machines, capable of running the game online before.
To prevent this, the demoed smoke effects or a functionally comparable variation of them have to be able to run on non-Nvidia hardware. They don't need to look quite as good but they must impact gameplay exactly the same as on PhysX enabled hardware to be viable for EVE: Legion. New Eden in general and Dust/Legion specifically are highly competitive environments where any and every effect that might mean a tactical disadvandage in combat is turned off immediately to the detriment of visual fidelity.
Nvidia/CCP: Let us all appreciate the gameplay enhancing benefit of this new technology. Do not let it become dead-weight-feature no one with competitive gameplay in mind will turn on and provide a software alternative (bonus points if it still looks good).
TL;DR: Gameplay affecting physics need to work on all brands of hardware in one way or another or using them will pose a competitive disadvantage.
You can take a benign object, -you can take a cheeseburger and deconstruct it to its source...
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ZDub 303
TeamPlayers
Dirt Nap Squad.
2953
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Posted - 2014.05.19 23:39:00 -
[2] - Quote
Great post - very good point. One of the negatives to a non-uniform hardware spec platform. |
ANON Cerberus
Tiny Toons
726
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Posted - 2014.05.19 23:44:00 -
[3] - Quote
On point, and you even covered something I was initially going to post about CPU`s being able to run physX. I'm glad I read the whole thing first.
I think it all comes down to what CCP is able to do. One player might just see a hazy smoke screen, another sees detailed thick smoke. As long as game play wise, no matter what graphical settings are use - the game play remains intact, then I dont see why CCP cannot continue to pursue new graphics options.
That being said, the OP makes a great point CCP. Don't overlook this small fact. |
Leeroy Gannarsein
Legio DXIV
191
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Posted - 2014.05.20 15:22:00 -
[4] - Quote
Maybe we should just stick with PS4? :P
(I kid, I kid. But I'd picked a 280X to stick in my build; this is making me want to go for the 770 after all...)
MY ACTUAL NAME IS LORHAK
It would seem like wisdom, but for the warning in my heart...
CCP BLOWOUT FOR CPM1
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Godin Thekiller
shadows of 514
2356
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Posted - 2014.05.20 18:43:00 -
[5] - Quote
As long as I can see pretty much the same level of graphics on my 2 290X's, I don't care...........
click me
Blup Blub Bloop. Translation: Die -_-
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Son Down
SamsClub
175
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Posted - 2014.05.20 18:53:00 -
[6] - Quote
CCP should seriously consider hiring some quality people from Tripwire. With their gameplay mechanics and graphical experience from Red Orchestra using UE3, I don't understand how this hasn't happened already. |
BullsON Parade
YourCorp NameHere
41
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Posted - 2014.05.20 19:04:00 -
[7] - Quote
Son Down wrote:CCP should seriously consider hiring some quality people from Tripwire. With their gameplay mechanics and graphical experience from Red Orchestra using UE3, I don't understand how this hasn't happened already.
Actually, the Red Orchestra games are exactly the kind of "gritty" that CCP was originally spewing about when they first released Dust.
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