so i recently picked up a copy of mirrors edge, and this is my first real experience with physx. i know im "not supposed" to run it on my ATI card...but im noticing some peculiarities that i wondered if anyone else has run into. first off, running with physx turned off produces nasty refresh lines when panning the camera from side to side. it doesnt seem to matter how much AA i have or if vsync is on or off. this is the reason id like to leave physx on. second, is the drop in framerates during shootout scenes (physx on). this is something a lot of ATI guys seem to have a problem with...but just for fun i ran the game with MSI afterburner and CPU tweaker open to see what my chips are doing. during most gameplay, the CPU is at around 50% load and GPU in the 90's. everything is smooth and clean. but then during heavy combat/action scenes, my CPU load on all 4 cores goes nuts and my GPU drops to 0% why on earth is it completely shutting down my GPU? trying to run a modern game on CPU alone is...slow...to say the least the GPU usage history tells the tale: playing along (90%), entered combat (0%), died due to low frame rates and respawned at save spot (90%), entered the same combat (0%) and screen shot
I beleive this is because the physx calcuations are being done by the CPU which takes much longer to process than that of an nvidia gfx card, thus the game is waiting for the physx calculations before it then renders whats going on. Ensure your gfx card drivers and the game is up to date, maybe they fixed this in a hotpatch? (i dont own the game so i dont know) You could try installing a low speced nvidia series 8 or above gfx card to do the physx calcualtions for you instead of the cpu, leaving the ATI card to render the graphics. However to do this you need a special set of moddded nvidia drivers which unlocks the physx feature of the nvidia card which is locked at a driver level upon detecting an ati/intel/matrox (anythign thats not nvidia basicly) gfx card installed into the pc. These can be found here... Hybrid PhysX mod v1.03 / v1.04ff
thanks for the suggestion, but im afraid buying a video card specially for a 2 year old game might be taking it a little far but heres what i did do: there is a patch for the game, which i downloaded and installed. i also downloaded nvidias latest driver suite and installed the latest physx drivers from there. after that was done...i still get terrible framerates with physx on but...the horrible tearing is no longer present with physx off so ive declared it "playable". its still a great looking game with everything else maxed, and it runs very smooth for being a port. i even managed to tweak the input file to accept commands with my playstation controller
that was my first thought too, but i had tried it with vsync both on and off and it didnt make a difference. it only went away with physx on. im not sure if it was the game patch or the updated physx drivers, but the tearing is gone now. ive read that switching physx off and on actually only switches it from hardware to software acceleration, which makes sense to me because the game looks basically the same to me with it off or on.
Look, the date of your PhysX driver has nothing to do with it. You're using an ATI card. The slowness is due to emulating physx in software. And as for 2-year old game machine: look, if you want to do the latest stuff, you have to have cutting-edge hardware. You can't kludge it on the cheap and expect stuff to bounce off other stuff and water to splash in realtime. -- faye
as i said in my original post, im aware ATI cards dont run physx properly. and actually, the slow down is caused by the ATI card trying to render physx on hardware. turning physx "off" in this game actually just switches from hardware acceleration to software acceleration...which ATI cards have less problems with. so even though physx is off, im still using the drivers, which is why i updated them. and my machine isnt 2 years old, its about 6 months old. the game mirrors edge is 2 years old
WRONG!!! I have a G200 512MB 8800GT for GFX and a 8500GT for PhysX and they work very well with any games apart from the obvious system crushing games. They cost me less than £90 for the two and are now about 2 and 1ish years old respectfully. And my PhysX is real time or there would be no point in having it. And Please, there's no need to crush someone just because they don't have the latest and greatest like you (that's twice in two of your posts I've read so far).
> WRONG!!! > I have a G200 512MB 8800GT for GFX and a 8500GT for PhysX and they work very well with any games Yes, and I had three 8800 GTS's. So what? My point was that PhysX is an Nvidia product and the poster is complaining that it doesn't work with an ATI card. By "cutting edge hardware" I meant a g90 or better nvidia GPU, ie.e, one that supports PhysX. > And my PhysX is real time or there would be no point in having it. Yes, that's really very nice. But you have nvidia hardware; the poster doesn't. > And Please, there's no need to crush someone just because they don't have the latest and greatest like you ??? WTF? First of all, I now use a crappy Radeon 4600. Why I do is very interesting and I wanted to ask a question about it in the "industry news" forum, but I seem to be unable to post new threads. I'll stick it at the end of this. Secondly, I swear that someday I'll shoot myself if you non-autistics don't stop playing ego-domination games in every single thing you say, and assuming I do too. There's a time for that and it isn't a technology forum. I don''t think I'm better than anybody because of my PC--the suggestion would be too bizarre to talk about it if you hadn't made it. > that's twice in two of your posts I've read so far GOD ONLY KNOWS what the other one was. I assume I'll find it. Was it where I talked about the amazing speed increase I got from adding a 4G ramdrive as the temp and paging files? Did you interpret that as "bragging" that I have 8G? I am SO sorry for trying to help people. And please, if you have something nasty or personal to say, tell me in a private message. I don't want tech or (especially) science conversations contaminated by "the sickness". And why the big "WRONG!!!"? You normal people make me depressed and despondent, and I'm not kidding. I actually abandoned so-called "humanity" and became a hermit because of this kind of B.S. Why do you people have to climb all over each other for "lookit me I'm COO-WELL" ego-strutting? And it's not just a guy thing; it's a non-autistic thing. If I'm wrong (which I wasn't in this case), so what? I've been wrong before, and one reason I'm TRYING to find a tech forum where the people aren't infected is so I can become LESS wrong and LESS stupid. Now, if it's okay with you, BACK TO WHY I CAME TO THIS FORUM: I used to be rabidly in love with Nvidia products ever since the 6000 series. Then I got the last AGP they made, the 7800, and I couldn't WAIT for the 8800 prices to come down. Finally I got an 8800 GTS... with, not just the G90, but the newer G92 chip! Smaller, faster, cooler. Yaaay! But my excitement, as it always is about everything, was short lived. The 8800 died in a couple of months. I hadn't saved the receipt because, hell, it was nvidia! So I bought another one and didn't keep the receipt for the same reason. Sure enough, it died in a couple of months too. When a THIRD one died, I started thinking something funny's going on, and I read, to my horror, that nvidia G92 GPUS were ALL defective and die in a few months, every single one, that nvidia knew about it, lied about it, and kept selling them anyway. Reminiscent of the Intel FPU disaster, instead of telling the truth, saying "oops", and cleaning up their mess, nvidia blamed HP, who was the first company screwed by it, knowing they were blaming an innocent company with a lie. When HP proved it was a manuf defect involving the chip/package solder, they sued nvidia for libel. So did the stockholders, who got lied to in an annual report. Then I read the shocking horror stories about makes-you-want-to-throw-up marketing dishonesty Nvidia does, like at trade shows. I did a blog item about what the problem was (it's very interesting!), and one about Nvidia covering it up and lying to everyone. Anyway, I wrote to Nvidia telling them why I'm switching to ATI and that I'd start recommending ATI to all the people who ask my advice. I'm sure they didn't give a %$#@. I had abandoned ATI years earlier because their drivers are written by a special-ed typing class. Their software was grotesque. But now I had to switch back from one Christmas color to the other again, so i did, thus the Radeon 4600. (The onboard ATI 790(?) chipset is totally worthless for graphics.) I can't even get decent smooth-scrolling in Firefox, so I gave up on graphics and just chalk it up to yet another capitalist market failure. I don't play #D games anyway, I just like second life, google earth, and screwing around with the nvidia interactive 3D demos (the smoke box is my fave. GOD!). --> MY QUESTION IS: does anyone know what ever happened to nvidia because of this shameful event? Did HP win the suit? Did nvidia ever acknowledge they screwed up? Did they have to give millions to the stockholders? Do they now have a s***stained reputation like microsoft, or has everybody forgotten about it? There was even talk about nvidia going under because of it. What kind of financial hit did they take? -- faye kane homeless brain
What, like, ...everrrr. Some kind of smug BS with no recognizable meaning. And no answers about nvidia's current place in the industry. > please, stop Ok, I'm stopped. I'm going to look for a serious tech forum. Bye-bye. -flk
There you go, all the links you could ever want; http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=nv...&ie=&oe=&redir_esc=&ei=5ASnTKa2B9vNjAfNhpHJDA
