PPU games - will PhysX work on GPU?

cyclone3d

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After doing a lot of searching, I am unable to find anything that states whether or not old PPU only accelerated PhysX titles will work with GPU accelerated PhysX.

Anybody have a definite answer?

I don't have an Nvidia CPU that I can test with and really have no desire to buy one just to find out that it won't work anyway.
 
I did a little looking around myself and couldn't get a straight answer. It sounds like you may need to install the PhysX Legacy drivers here but as for if that will enable full hardware accelerated PhysX for those old titles, I'm not sure. I did read that the old dedicated PPU isn't supported by modern PhysX drivers and it sounds like getting it working may be a bit of a pain.

I've read that not all effects were supported on the GPU, but this is old info. No one seems to care enough to update it for modern hardware -- understandably, it was underwhelming at its best and has been passed over countless times since. What game(s) were you wanting to play? If I can find a copy cheap enough I'd be willing to test for you on my machine.
 
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CellFactor: Revolution, now there is a game title I haven't heard about in years.
Totally brings me back to 2007 all over again.
 
Yeah... no go, though it's not clear why.

I'm on Windows 10, so maybe you can get someone still on 7 to try it? I've got it running as admin with Vista compatibility enabled, but no dice.

It starts with a black screen and standard white mouse cursor. Waiting does nothing, and if I click it crashes with an error about 3 DLLs in the main program directory.

I'll mess with it a little bit, but I think we're getting to the point where some 10+ year old games with stuff as proprietary as PhysX are going to require a dedicated "retro" machine.

Good news is, if for whatever reason you really want to do that, I bet you can for like, $100 if you look around a little.
 
Yeah... no go, though it's not clear why.

I'm on Windows 10, so maybe you can get someone still on 7 to try it? I've got it running as admin with Vista compatibility enabled, but no dice.

It starts with a black screen and standard white mouse cursor. Waiting does nothing, and if I click it crashes with an error about 3 DLLs in the main program directory.

I'll mess with it a little bit, but I think we're getting to the point where some 10+ year old games with stuff as proprietary as PhysX are going to require a dedicated "retro" machine.

Good news is, if for whatever reason you really want to do that, I bet you can for like, $100 if you look around a little.


Ok, thanks for trying.

I actually am putting together a few retro machines to run older stuff. The one with the AGEIA PhysX card is running XP.

Also putting together a DOS/Win98 machine and a Win98 machine.

Just trying to nail down final details about what will run on specific hardware that I haven't used or tried before.
 
Ok, so I finally found a bit of info... at least regarding CellFactor:Revolution.

Looks like it can't even run unless you have a PPU installed. Some early version of the demo could be made to run with PhysX turned off, but they changed it from the little info I found.

And it looks like if a game was made to use the PPU, it will not be able to use GPU PhysX unless there was a patch released to make it able to do so.

https://forums.geforce.com/default/...ion-amp-physx-gpu-physx-unable-to-be-enabled/
 
At one point I believe Nvidia or someone else maintained a list and I clearly remember many old PPU only titles were not compatible with GPU based PhysX.
 
At one point I believe Nvidia or someone else maintained a list and I clearly remember many old PPU only titles were not compatible with GPU based PhysX.

Yeah, I wasn't sure if the PPU only thing had changed or not. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to make PPU only games work with GPU PhysX.

In any case, this is the best resource I have found:
Main Page - PhysX Wiki

PPU supported games:
PhysXInfo.com - Projects using PhysX SDK

GPU shuuported games:
PhysXInfo.com - Projects using PhysX SDK
 
Yeah, I wasn't sure if the PPU only thing had changed or not. It seems like it would be fairly trivial to make PPU only games work with GPU PhysX.

True. Sadly, even the few hours (days?) of programmer time it'd take to adapt aren't worthwhile. All the PPU dedicated titles are dead games -- zero revenue for years and years now, near zero revenue even back when Nvidia bought PhysX. It doesn't make (and never made) sense to put the effort in to support them. The audience that cared was way, way too small even back then, and now it's even smaller. Sadly, it was/is just good business to ignore it.
 
I remember I purchased an Ageia PhysX card just because of UT3. What a dud it turned out to be IMHO.
 
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