HARDWARE PHYSICS

Scythe supports the Ageia Hardware accelerated physics cards. If you have a PhysX PPU card and are using Scythe with the PhysX engine selected in the environment options, you can switch between hardware and software physics using the option in the TOOLS menu:

ACTIVATING HARDWARE PHYSICS

When this menu option is ticked, Scythe will use the PhysX hardware for the simulations. If you dont have a PPU card installed, it will still run in software mode.

SIMULATION DIFFERENCES

- The hardware uses different systems internally to the software mode, so the simulation may behave slightly differently. Not in a positive or negative way, just differently.

- Simple scenes will not show improvement, in fact they may even be slower. This information from Ageia sums it up well:

"The performance of the HW really depends on which features the application uses, and to what extent. A jet plane is obviously much faster than a car for long trips, but for simply getting across town, the overhead of flying (even if the airports happened to be in walking distance of the start and end points) makes driving more efficient.

In terms of PhysX, simulating:

1) A few rigidbodies: is going to be faster on any CPU than PhysX HW

2) A couple dozen ragdolls: may run about the same performance on good CPUs as PhysX HW

3) A hundred jointed-RB tree trunks with cloth foliage: will certainly run better on the PhysX HW"

- Also bear in mind that the point of physics Hardware is to take the load of the CPU so it can process AI and game logic. The simulation in Scythe has no AI or game logic to process, so it is not a good indication of the performance benefits in an actual game.