Other options to PhysX?

#1 PhysX will run on ATI cards as well, you just won't have hardware acceleration. If you really don't want to use PhysX, there are other physics engines out there, such as Bullet, ODE, Newton, etc. Bullet is the only one of these that has hardware acceleration, but since it uses the CUDA API from nVidia, it also requires an nVidia card for hardware physics.

#2 Thanks for the reply Taylor...

What kind of performace hit can you expect without hardware acceleration. I'm planning on having a LOT of physical collisions happenning in real-time... imagine crumbling mountains...

Which physics engine would you use?...

#3 Without hardware acceleration there are definitely going to be some limitations on the number of physics-enabled objects you can have. I haven't ever used Newton, Bullet, or ODE, but with PhysX I've found that this computer can handle at most a couple hundred active PhysX objects without acceleration.

If I had to pick, I'd use PhysX, simply because that's what I've added to my TGEA build already. I've found that its easy to integrate, and gives nice looking results as well. However, in your case it may be better to use something open source like Bullet or ODE. It sounds like you may need to write some custom code to handle the number of objects you'd like to have in the scene.

#4 The fact that you're forcing the user to download another distribution set only to play your game put me off. I'm using Havok since it came out with the new license and enjoying every moment of it.

Granted, it's lower level than PhysX but if you can cope with their license it's really great. The support they (ie, the developers) provide to hobbyists are also much much better than the zombie PhysX forum. I also feel you get more control over different properties and doesn't crash nearly as often when you feed it the wrong data.

#5 What about for T3D? What are the options for running collisions simulations in T3D?... Pretty much the same as TGEA?