Comments (4)

Risen which is made by the guys who originally made Gothic 1,2 and I think 3.... already uses Physx physics engine which is done on the CPU, its not too bad.

Currently playing the game and its a lot of fun, It's my second ever RPG (first being Diablo2)... not a huge fan of RPG games as I dont have the time to sink into them... but RISEN is really interesting and looks so so nice!

Gothic 4 (Arcania) looks very similar, almost the same actually!

There seems to be a disconnect between the concerns of those in the forum and the reply/focus of this news bit. It sounds like the concern from the forum posters and open letter is that JoWood, by using PhysX as their physics/simulation engine for Gothic 4, would be unfairly favoring or optimizing for Nvidia hardware and thus, resulting in Gothic 4 running better on Nvidia hardware compared to ATI hardware.

The key distinction here is that PhysX as a physics engine can be tailored to different target hardware so that the basic effects can be accelerated via software on any CPU. There are additional effects and capabilities that are currently only supported on Nvidia 8800 and higher series GPU and the legacy Ageia PhysX accelerators. The software effects obviously would not have any optimizations for Nvidia or ATI, which is what the community manager is stating. The hardware effects however, if implemented, would obviously favor Nvidia hardware as hardware PhysX acceleration can only be implemented currently on Nvidia GPUs.

So what you would have in the end is software PhysX (like basically all UE3.0 games) that wouldn't benefit from an Nvidia or ATI card because the effects are running on the CPU. Or you would have enhanced hardware PhysX, which would run slower overall but offer enhanced physics/AI/cloth simulations on Nvidia hardware only. Since the ATI part cannot currently accelerate these additional hardware PhysX features, the CPU would attempt to, offering unacceptably low performance. If this prospect is something that bothers ATI owners, they need to lobby and complain to ATI about it to either adopt hardware PhysX support or to convince game developers to use whatever physics standard they are supporting this month.