Hey Guys,

right atm I am thinking of buying A8 because of PhysX for Gravix (too many x's ). This might be a stupid question but is it worth it? Is PhysX really so much better than ODE? Because the money is here and maybe I just want to have ONE post that says "Yes, omg sooo amazing, ode fuck off, physx ftw" and than I will buy it. Anybody can tell me about it? Because 100 bucks are also not little money for an student

ODE has some annoying bugs and missing features. that's why every other physics engine is better than it.

actually physx originally was based on ODE. in my opinion it isn't that great either but at least they improved and fixed it a bit.

I purchased A7 just before A8 came out so I got a free upgrade. I converted my simple ODE physics game to PhysX and distributed it to some testers. I believe 2/5 couldn't get the game to start. 2/5 had completely messed up physics where their player was "bucking" instead of driving. 1/5 who had an Nvidia card and was programming PhysX into his own game on a different engine, couldn't run it out of the box, and when he fixed it, it still had the bucking problem if I recall.

I haven't really tried to figure out why this all happened but if 5 people I test with can not play it easily, I give up. ODE physics is currently working fine for them.

all the pc's that use a game with PhysX should have installed the PhysX drivers, maybe that was the reason

But if you need to install at first physx drivers I have to ditribute them also.

Did anybody also had those troubles with PhysX?

For distributing the nVidia PhysX driver you must show the nVidia logo at the start of your game. Apart from that I've not seen any problems.

From my test so far, the two main differences between ODE and PhysX are that PhysX supports a lot more physics objects, and the PhysX car template is way better than the ODE car template. Also you have more joint objects and the whole simulation is more stable.

So the PhysX Driver needs to be installed manually by the User,
or is the dll loaded directly from the install folder?

No, it is very unprofessional to let your end user manually install the PhysX driver.

Better include the PhysX driver in your installation program when you distribute a PhysX game. All PhysX games that I know install the driver automatically, they do not require the user to do that. But the DLL is not enough, you really need the driver.

GnR said, some users had a wrong working Physics simulation,
thats really worrying.

Sure an enduser should not have to do more than doing a
doubleclick.
Wich obviously ends up in the requirement to
use an installer that handles all installations.

Anyone else having a problem running PhysX?

I found that PhysX is much more stable than ODE. I have converted my two apps to PhysX, it went smooth. The previous problems that happened with ODE at high speeds are gone. I had not noticed any problems with PhysX on different PCs.