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Unscientific Poll: Gamers Don't Care about PhsyX

Posted 05/07/09 at 10:07:23 AM  by Paul Lilly

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Several upcoming titles have announced support for Nvidia's hardware PhysX, which could be good news for the GPU maker. However, up until this point, games supporting PhysX have been a mixed bag, perhaps leading to a sense of apathy among gamers. Or at least that's what AnadTech's newest poll seems to suggest.

When asked how important hardware PhysiX acceleration is in buying software, 52 percent of the nearly 9,000 respondents said it was only "Marginal; PhysX is a bonus if a game I like supports it." Thirty-one percent took it a step further calling PhysX 'Not useful,' and 3 percent said it was "Detrimental." Only 13 percent found PhysX 'Useful,' 'Important,' or 'Very Important.'

Things weren't much better (for Nvidia) when the same question was asked about making a hardware buying decision. A slightly less 79 percent of respondents found PhysX to be anywhere from a marginal to detrimental marketing bullet. And the responses weren't overly swayed by ATI videocard owners, either. According to current poll results, 52 percent of respondents own an Nvidia card with support for PhysX.

You can take the poll here.

COMMENTS:12
TAGS: games, Software, physics, physx, Videogames, gamers, poll
COMMENTS
avatarScientific Poll: Hardcore PhsyX sells VideoCards!

Submitted by periodhyphenund... on Fri, 05/08/2009 - 7:39pm

Interactive Pornos with 3D Poser Models using PhysX Physical Modelling would sell Graphics cards by the millions!

 

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avatarYou need to relook seems positive by my count.

Submitted by RodneySB on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 11:52am

65% of people basically say its good if games they like have support for it.  So the fact that more games comming our are going to support it means that 65% are going to be even more pleased and those 31% that said it didnt' matter till cross platform (they mean there ATI card) will cry. 

 Look at any benchmarks with games that supports physX and tell me Nvidia does own ATI at that same cost.  More games going this way is only more bad news for ATI.  No wait they will just turn the jucie up more and give you cards that burn out quicker so they can try and keep up.

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avatarWith and Without

Submitted by MeTo on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 9:12pm

I have played the same game with and without physx and the differance is not that spectacular. IMHO

Linux Mint,Duel boot/Vista,AMD Athlon+ x2 5600,3 Gig ram,500 Gig HDD,ATI 1300 Video.

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avatarRodneySB on Thu, 2009-05-07

Submitted by Jox on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 8:24pm

RodneySB on Thu, 2009-05-07 12:52
Look at any benchmarks with games that supports physX and tell me Nvidia does own ATI at that same cost.

Name 2 PhysX games without using a search engine.

PhysX technology failed as a stand-alone product. As a part of nVidia's offering it's done nothing to woo me away from ATI. Without widespread support from game developers, it's of no value. Without widespread hardware adoption, it's not worth the hassle for game developers to implement/support. Such technology can only exist as open source or monopoly.

-Jox

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avatarMirror's Edge and UT3. i had

Submitted by bingojubes on Fri, 05/08/2009 - 6:30am

Mirror's Edge and UT3. i had an old XFX Nvidia card that i didn't know DIDN NOT support PhysX. I didn;t like it because of the involuntary install of it during game installation. After trying it out, my old card made UT3 look like it was playing at 320x480... it was super crappy. so i switched to my current (at the time) radeon 3650, and all is well. i uninstalled the PhysX stuff off my comuter, but then i could not play the games because of "errors".

Killed my support for PhysX pretty quick then. And the involuntary installation of it doesn't help, either. I think that it should have worked like DirectX - detect it, and only update if necessary, and only if i wanted to.

 

DOS Games never had or required PhysX, and there are some real memorable titles, so why need it now?

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avatarWell no wonder the PhysX

Submitted by Keith E. Whisman on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 11:16am

Well no wonder the PhysX add-in cards didn't sell and Nvidia was able to purchase them. PhysX only marginally enhances a game. Cames for a long time have had marginal physics but looked stunning. For me a Game has to first be alot of fun, it has to look really awesome, it has to be challenging but not overly so, it has to be winable, it has to have great sound and sound effects, and it has to be memorable. Half Life and Crisis does that. Doom and Warcraft did that. All the great games out there share these atributes. Do I care about PhysX support? Absolutely not. It will never drive my buying decision. If a game has it it has it. I don't really care what the game producer uses and does to make the game great it just has to follow the above attributes that makes a game great.

I've played hundreds of games but only dozens of games were actually great and memorable.

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avatarOne thing about PhysX and

Submitted by LatiosXT on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 10:59am

One thing about PhysX and physics in general is... does it really matter to do more than we have right now? Physics beyond ragdoll and rigid body physics (basically what you see in Half Life 2) seems more like icing on a cake. Take a look at HDR Rendering. Who cares? Can you go up to a gamer and ask them what HDR rendering is and expect the correct answer? Yet all these new games have it. And what about parallax mapping? Granted it was OMFG when Epic used it in the Unreal Engine 3 techdemo, but now it's like, okay. I used to oogle at the bullet holes in FEAR, but I don't think anyone would appreciate them. They just probably treat it as any other bullet hole they've seen.

 So I'm in the marginal section. It's great to see it in action, but it doesn't really do anything.

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avatargames would run better if it

Submitted by bingojubes on Fri, 05/08/2009 - 6:32am

games would run better if it didn't have to SHOW bullet holes. think of all the resources i could be saving by not having to render every hole in the wall... :)

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avatarthey're probably just

Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Fri, 05/08/2009 - 2:15pm

they're probably just textures

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avatarthe technology will never

Submitted by AndyYankee17 on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 8:42am

the technology will never take off unless it becomes an open standard

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avatarNew technology

Submitted by Da Man on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 7:56am

Given the "newness" of the technology actually be incorporated into games, I wouldn't expect these results to be any different. However given enough time PhysX could be a great boon for games by taking processes off the CPU, or it could be simply be another "great idea" gone bad....only time will tell since this is new.

Now if it became officially supported with ATI chipsets as well, then well it will probably take off as another graphic card standard spec.

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avatarOld Technolgy

Submitted by MeTo on Thu, 05/07/2009 - 8:30am

 PhysX has been out for years Nvidia has had it for a year I have seen no remarkable increase in frame rates but look at the pretty snow flakes. What a waste. IMHO

Linux Mint,AMD Athlon+ x2 5600,3 Gig ram,500 Gig HDD,ATI 1300 Video.

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