Because I just read and downloaded a new driver from Nvidia that allows my 8800GT to double as a Physics Accelerator. With this breakthrough development will it now be possible for Bullet to have Physics acceleration through the PhysX API? All you would need now is a GeForce 8 series and above and no seperate PPU.
Or would it be better for Erwin to simply add multithreading support for up to 4 cores and more for Bullet? Either of these would allow insane physics and more interactivity in BGE worlds like tiny debris and lots of little physics objects.
I’m not sure but isn’t PhysX a complete physics library or something?.. If so, it would mean that bullet would have to be replaced with PhysX in order to use it. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon…
With this breakthrough development will it now be possible for Bullet to have Physics acceleration through the PhysX API?
Simple answer: no.
Long answer: Bullet and PhysX are two completely different physics engines. This is like saying:
“DirectX can now handle 3X as many polygons, so now Blender will be able to run 3X faster!”
Wrong. As you already know, blender runs off of OpenGL. If DirectX is improved, it will not make blender faster. This same concept is applied to Bullet/PhysX. PhysX improvements, will only help PhysX, not Bullet.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the only way this would help Bullet Physics is if Bullet has some PhysX API commands. And I believe it doesn’t.
I’d like to see blender use havok physics. It’s used in a lot of popular game engines and has recently become free on PC for non-commercial use(Don’t care about money).
Yea. I’ve already seen the new bullet 2.70. But have you ever played hl2? The physics are so sweet, I know it’s possible to do the same with bullet but it would be nice to see an experimental build that uses PhysX or Havok just to compare. (I prefer Havok)
yeah I own Half-Life 2 Episode 1, and Multiplayer, Bioshock, and Crysis - and none of their physics are as sweet as Bullet 2.70 - Bullet 2.70 is literally cutting edge, but because it has to do with blender some people automatically underestimate it?
I’m not underestimating it. I know that bullet can do even better than Havok or PhysX. I’d just like to see an experimental build to see any difference in performance and realism.
but there is no point - because havok and physx get optimized for whatever platform/engine they are on, and unless someone wants to optimize them also for blender/general windows/general linux - they will not run as well for blender users - they are not open source.
Honestly I just don’t get the point. The Bullet physics demos I just played are far superior to ANY game I’ve ever SEEN. Let alone played or modded. I just don’t think the community at large actually understands how profound of an upgrade the latest bullet build is. =/
the trick with demos, especially ones like the bullet physics demos, is it’ll be years until it’s feasibly possible to use them along with graphics and logic of any degree. I remember playing with the physx demos, which can to the same exact stuff (water, cloth,softbody, etc) but are older- as far as I’ve seen, only unreal tournament 3 uses even some of the softbody stuff, and only if you have a physx card.
I’m told havok also recently got those features, but I believe havok is just generally more efficient at doing what is actually doable, which with modern computers is still in the realm of ragdoll and rigid body, not dynamic fluid sims and softbodies that can tear
Unless you want your entire game to be a red ball rolling down a piece of cloth or two and landing in a box of water (the end, you win), the new stuff is a bit too CPU intensive.
I’m not trying to rip on bullet or anything, but I know that years ago I saw a sim with real-time SSS including muscle and bone calculation; this still hasn’t made its way into games yet, because while it works when it’s just a single head floating in a void, it’s far too much to put in a game.
That would be true for Nvidia GPU demos which are infamous for doing that type of thing. But I don’t think that has anything to do with this physics demo. I mean dam, the demo has a 3000 barrel benchmark!!! Will you be throwing 3000 barrels into your scene? Or how about 136 ragdolls? These demos are overkill examples and they run at a blisteringly fast speed. These aren’t mock ups as far as I can tell this is the real thing. Just throw it inside of blender and away we go.
Btw you are severely underestimating modern hardware which can totally do these kinds of physics btw. And dude they all ready have fluid sims in the UT3 engine. And ragdolls in Crysis and GTA4 and the Bullet demo many other examples. What are you talking about?
Crysis can do the real time SSS and muscle articulation!
Unfortunately you were speaking without knowing what you were talking about. And I don’t mean that as a flame. But your observations are about 3-4 years outdated.
XD well, lets suppose they are still slow, but some simple things like ropes could be really usefull and the rope sim must be more accurate and fast than using a bunch of cubes with constraints. also, since there is some softbody simulation we might have deformable hulls for armature-driven meshes (wich is really useful too)
my point about the barrels and ragdolls is the same as yours; all the engines can do that. and as I said, unreal 3 has the water and softbodies and all that. however, having played ut3 with a physx card on a modern crysis rig (nvidia 9800, gobs of ram, quad-core, etc) it still looks like shit and runs badly. it will be a while before these features are actually useful and doable well in a game at the same time as all the rest of the logic and graphics for a game. (in ut3 this stuff physx accelerated only- I’ve played it without, the water’s just planes with refraction shaders, there’s no cloth or bendable metal)
I was wrong about the sss, true. I googled it several different ways and came up with nothing.
just out of curiosity, what does muscle articulation have to do with this argument? it’s usually just shapekeys, most engines can do that nowadays even the BGE in the apricot builds)
[edit] oh, I see where that came up. I mentioned muscle and bone calculation in sss shaders. I doubt they do that in crysis, and muscle articulation is pretty much unrelated.
it generally annoys me when people put words in my mouth then argue against points I didn’t make.
Sorry, I didn’t dwell too much on your muscle stuff seeing as it really didn’t have much to do with Bullet physics at all just as you said, so I just saw a long word and guessed at what you were getting on about - seeing as it really wasn’t important at all just as you say. Again I’m sorry about that.
So I’m taking it that your real point is that “UT3 sux so the Bullet 2.70 demo must be an optical illusion.” Or what are you saying?
Cuz I mean using the old Bullet physics I can have 30 or more 10,000 triangle UV spheres within a 2million triangle scene featuring landscape, texture, rigged character with animations, and have them roll around on the ground and still have 60fps.
I’m going to guess that the Bullet 2.70 has better performance than the one we currently have.