How do we make Physics "Needed for the operation of an operating system"

[Fel]

With the bickering about how physics intensive the game is, I feel it is time that PhysX actually come back from the pseudo hardware level to an actual independent system. And why not? Why not have a completely devoted chip to physical simulations.

Of course, the problem is getting people to buy it; and if people don't buy it games won't be developed to use it... which hence leads to people not buying it.

Unless... we somehow convince Microsoft that "The Next Generation of Computers need Real-Time 256-bit physics simulations" (Hey, if Microsoft says computers need a dedicated GPU just to open a Word Document, computers need a dedicated GPU.... just a little push to get them to agree to adding a PPU)

That way, all the problems of KSP will be fixed and everyone will be happy.

[_Aramchek_]

A standalone card isn't necessary, both vendor's cards' are capable of doing physics calculations in hardware through opencl, and current offerings from both companies should be able to do it on chip at a decent performance level.

The real problem is that while there is a standard, no one is really using it, or, as is the case with KSP, the unity engine doesn't support gpu accelerated physx nor does it utilize opencl physics for vendor agnostic physics calculations.

The unity engine is stuck using the cpu for physics, and even worse, it only uses one core to do it.

[Tollazor]

Increasingly it seems the Unity engine was a poor choice for KSP.

KSP really needs, at the very least, multi-threading. At the moment I can't recommend this game to non-techie people due to the instability and the poor performance. Most of the instability, it seems, comes from the game being stuck using 32-bit and stuck using a single thread when the majority of chips out there sacrifice raw CPU power for better multi-thread capabilities.

[Fel]

I recognize that the GPU can perform most of the calculations; but what if you wanted "Good Graphics" and "Good Physics", the GPU would be doing twice the load.

And of course if Microsoft decides there needs to be physics in their computers, then a STANDARD (albeit not a good standard) will be made.

[SecondGuessing]

I recognize that the GPU can perform most of the calculations; but what if you wanted "Good Graphics" and "Good Physics", the GPU would be doing twice the load.

And of course if Microsoft decides there needs to be physics in their computers, then a STANDARD (albeit not a good standard) will be made.

I don't think 'good graphics' is something we need worry about with KSP.

The Unity engine is most likely the issue; games like Borderlands 2 handle physX quite reasonably, but I believe they handle physX using more than one core, which is obviously going to work better.

[_Aramchek_]

I recognize that the GPU can perform most of the calculations; but what if you wanted "Good Graphics" and "Good Physics", the GPU would be doing twice the load.

And of course if Microsoft decides there needs to be physics in their computers, then a STANDARD (albeit not a good standard) will be made.

Borderlands 2 is an example of a game doing both well on one card, although there is no game with a comparable level of physics to KSP.

Microsoft have made it a standard, it is core part of dx10 and onward, no one uses it though sadly.

Borderlands 2 does physx on the gpu.