Stop the Nvidia proprietary BS. Are there any alternatives?

As much as I like developers, especially the people at Epic who enabled this stuff, I’m on an AMD R9 290 graphics card and I can’t use any of the Nvidia proprietary junk like GPU-accelerated cloth physics, particle effects, destructible environments, etc, without any game I play slow to a chugging crawl. (I’ve tried playing XCom: The Bureau recently. Meh game, but **** does it chug to a slimy crawl as soon as particles or cloth appear in a scene. Don’t even get me started on Metro 2033 or Last Light.) Users and even some devs aren’t able to use as much stuff because we didn’t pay twice the price of an AMD card to enable such content.

I know it’s a marketing ploy to pay the premium in order to to make games pretty, but this is proprietary junk trying to force a monopoly from the only other graphics card developer in the industry that’s powerful enough to be competitive. Isn’t there any similar alternative technology that can take advantage of both AMD and Nvidia cards at the same time?

UE4 does not contain any features that only work on Nvidia and isn’t particularly optimized for any particular brand of graphics card. Epic has also stated before that they do not intend to add features that are only designed to work on one brand of graphics card.

Good to know that Epic isn’t biased about card brands. That has always been a rage issue with me since I’ve been a long time AMD user and I’ve had many modern games that include the Nvidia-only options. (Too late finding those out when the game crawls to a stop on a scene. Oh god, I just remembered the Scarecrow scene in Arkham Asylum.) I have tried the Cloth Example map and it ran much better than many retail games, especially looking down the entire hallway. Now I’m curious how UE4’s physics engine is like.

Hi Daminshi,

Darthviper is correct. This has been discussed multiple times here on the forums. Nvidia’s Apex and PhysX is included with the engine in a cross-platform manner so that it runs equally on AMD and Nvidia GPUs. This is done by using it on the CPU rather than GPU. Any of Nvidia’s tech included in their Gameworks is integrated by the developers making their games.

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to ask.

Tim

What about Nvidia Flex?

I know it has a direct compute version and is cross platfrom :slight_smile:

Here is a link :slight_smile:

One doubt. Will the above said features still run on CPU even if the user has NVIDIA GPU?

Yes, Apex and PhysX always use the CPU. These features are implemented as a cross-platform method. They do not switch to the GPU if there is a Nvidia GPU. I’d never stop playing with destructible meshes if it did. :wink:

Wouldn’t something like Bullet Physics running cross-platform GPU with OpenCL be better than CPU-bound PhysX?