Originally by: Hawk TT

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WARNING: Nerd talk ahead

PhysX / APEX Hair & Cloth Simulation in EVE

CCP uses NVidia PhysX for natural hair & cloth simulations in the New Character Creator. The same technology will be used in Incarna (a.k.a. Walking in stations). Hair & Cloth simulations require pretty intense calculations in real-time and depending on the level of detail could affect the frame-rates considerably.

Recent SiSi builds contain NVidia PhysX 2.8.4, which performs the calulcations either on the CPU or on NVidia GPUs (8xxx, 9xxx, 2xx, 4xx, 5xx series) if such GPU is present in the PC.

If you have NVidia GPU(s) installed in your PC, the PhysX core utilizes them very efficiently and automatically transfers the load from the CPU to the GPU. PhysX also manages the threading on the GPU atomatically. Unfortunately, if you don't have NVidia PhysX-compatible GPU, the PhysX processing is done purely on the CPU, which is much slower than any modern GPU for such parallel computations. The CPU is loaded with PhysX processing + all the other stuff, so you have two disadvantages:
a) Slower PhysX processing
b) Less CPU cycles for performing other tasks

The CPU Physx is multi-threaded, so the more CPU cores you have, the better, but CPU thread management IS NOT AUTOMATIC - IT'S UP TO THE DEVELOPERS TO MAKE IT EFFICIENT. This means that the developers have to take care for optimizing the CPU thread allocation and performance, at least until PhysX 3.0 SDK is released (already dealyed more than 1 year).

PhysX CPU Performance

I've made some interesting observations while playing with the New Character Creator with ALL GRAPHICS MAXED OUT + Super Sample AA 4x Enabled:
1) The FPS varies between 10 FPS and 19 FPS on my high-end machine (ATI Video Card, no NVidia PhysX compatible card)
2) Only 4 out of 8 logical CPU cores are utilized to some 30-40%. So, Hyper-Threading is not really supported
3) In contrast, the PhysX Benchmark FluidMark 1.3.2 manages to utilize all 8 cores @ 100% if you set it up for Stress Test (this is just an example for CPU thread-management, because in real-world if you give 100% of the CPU time to PhysX, EVE would not be playable)

Info about my PC
i7 Core 920 @ 3.6GHz OC (8 logical cores)
12 GB DDR3 RAM
Sapphire Radeon 5870 Toxic 2GB GDDR5
Catalyst 10.12 drivers

NVidia GPU owners - Feedback is needed...

I am very keen to collect some feedback from other playes, who have high-end NVidia GPUs or even dedicated PhysX GPUs in their systems - what is your FPS in the New Character Creator and what is your CPU utilization?

Ctrl+Shift+Alt+M opens the advanced monitor (Ctrl+F does not work) and you could click on Performance Tab to gather CPU / FPS statistics.

Results from PC's with i7 Core 920+ / at least 4GB RAM / NVidia GTX 460 / 470 / 480 / 5xx & Latest Drivers would be very interesting. Also configurations with dedicated PhysX GPU - at least Nvidia GTX 285 and up.

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