NVIDIA PhysX Demo Shows Rigid Body Physics Interactions on a Massive Scale

By
Scott Hayden
-
16

The demo, presented at NVIDIA’s event yesterday where they announced the new GTX 1080 Ti, covers a large area brimming with opportunity for physics-based interactions, a field of seemingly infinite boulders and a bulldozer created to show off the sort of scale that GPUs can drive interactions for rigid body simulation.

The new GPU rigid body physics comes as part of a new version of the company’s PhysX system, 3.4, which is part of the GameWorks package of rendering and simulation technologies which is now launching with DX12 support.

Previous GPU rigid body solutions had some trade-offs that NVIDIA says you won’t have to make with the demo, which no longer sacrifice PhysX features like joints.

NVIDIA also maintains the CPU-based algorithm and GPU-based algorithm “fundamentally match,” so you can switch between CPU and GPU depending upon the workload.

The company says they’ll be releasing the bulldozer demo to the public.

Disclosure: Along with other press, NVIDIA covered accommodation expenses for Road to VR to attend an event where information for this article was gathered.

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Scott Hayden
Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.

  • Super-impressive!

  • ipollute

    What’s so realistic about this? In reality, boulders don’t move when hit by bullets and they certainly don’t fly. tires and boulders don’t fly when pushed by a small ass tractor at 5 MPH, as a matter of fact, that tractor would have been stuck in the first 2 feet of that ruble.

    • Tony Murchison

      It’s not meant to be a realistic simulation of real-world physics. It’s meant to demonstrate in a visually obvious way that thousands of objects can be made to obey in-game physics through GPU processing.

      If the driver had gotten stuck after 2 feet, as they would in reality, there wouldn’t be much demonstration going on in this demo.

      • Ian Shook

        So maybe come up with a better demo? Not an attack at you, I just think they could’ve done better too.

        • yexi

          As a developer, I find this demo perfect.
          It’s only a good demonstration of the capability of the system. It’s not a good game, they only use the default character of UE4; they don’t even build light (you can see an alert message up left corner).

          It’s not for consumers anyway, it’s only a little example of physics integration to help developer… nothing more, nothing less.

          • JustNiz

            > As a developer, I find this demo perfect.

            Maybe that better explains why the physics is so ridiculous in most PC games.

          • Rook

            Notice, you said game and not sim.

          • crim3

            And your reply confirms that the average science/technical knowledge of population is pathetic. And what it’s even sadder, shockingly it leads to aggressive behaviours.

          • VRgameDevGirl

            I agree. Remember, non game dev’s don’t really understand these things. :)

    • taiiat

      herp a derp, the settings for how physics objects react are all tweakable.
      this Demo is configured to demonstrate the physics. games can implement with whatever physical settings they like.

      yno, just like uh….. 99% of technologies games have ever used? “but i don’t like the default settings!” then change them you idiot.

      in regards to this entire Comment chain, not anyone in particular.

  • OgreTactics

    Oh look, another PR Nvidia vaporware that nobody will use. Besidea few games that tried Trine or Gang Beast, nobody want’s to use PhysX. Also remember Flex, or better yet, that Turf Effect we never saw the color of?

    • Brent

      Resident evil 7 uses physics!

      • OgreTactics

        Yes it does, but not Nvidia’s PhysX

    • MancVandaL

      Well even he (Nvidia) admitted in the video that they weren’t happy with the way it was implemented, but are now happy that this new version will be more usable in games. He clearly states that in the video. So hopefully the situation you talk about will change.

      • OgreTactics

        Hopefully.

  • crim3

    What’s funny about this is that one day, suddenly, nvidia will announce: “Rigid body physics is lame. Just through away your recently purchased hardware that’s been officialy tagged as trash and buy our new hardware that does soft body physics.” :D