News Mix ATI & Nvidia? Lose PhysX

If Apple could force you to buy a Mac to be able to charge your iPod they would. You can bet on that.

And both nVidia and AMD already screw with you if you have an older card: There are hardly any bug fixes or optimizations for newer games for older cards, are there?
I don't know where you live but clearly there is no competitive market around. Otherwise you'd know that by playing by the rules you won't be very successful.

Sad but true.

//edit: Havok is OpenCL based, so technically it is OPENly available and, as you already said, nobody uses it. It's a gimmick just like PhysX but nVidia at least use it. Of course it's a restriction and of course everything should be open for everyone but we'd hardly race ahead with that kind of speed in development if there wasn't that much pressure of competition.

 

Most of what nVidia does is damage control, but in the process they generally highlight even more wrongs they've been committing.

 

My point wasn't whether they want to or not, but if they do or don't. Of course they'd love to do that, but they'd never get away with it. Which is why I don't understand how nVidia gets away with so much.

They're destroying their own reputation with each stunt like this.

 

They're still market leader, right?

I don't think it's ethically correct or very smart marketing-wise to do something like that but I can see why they do it. It makes sense business-wise.

 

So you buy an Nvidia graphics card and they disable the physics if it detects an ATI card. So Nvidia is denying you use of the hardware you have brought.

This surely goes against the law. I bet someone could sue for this and i'm sure its only a matter of time before they do.

Lets start a boycott Phys-X and Nvidia until they enable theier cards to do what they are supposed to do.

 

This is a dick move, and while I can see why they did it, it flies completely in the face of the traditional openness of the PC market. Open until we start making less money, right? I'm sorry that your new GT300 yields have been so terrible, NVIDIA, but this isn't the way to try to keep your customers. The market for discrete PhysX-dedicated cards is so absurdly low that it will likely have little to no impact on your bottom line. Now, it's possible there is a legitimate explanation - WQHL won't certify their drivers anymore, for example, if they don't remove the feature - but that they cite "business reasons" is extremely telling.

 

You do realize that AMD has an active license to use Havok on their full line of products, right?

 

Probably sour grapes as they realise that PhysX in it's current form will be dead in a few months anyway. It would be like Havok based Physics only running on an AMD cpu if the motherboard chipset is also made by AMD, but not an AMD cpu running on an Nvidia chipset.

 

I think they classify PhysX as bonus ability of their cards and they still sell them as graphics cards.

Why don't you all start asking about why we can't combine AMD and nVidia graphics cards for renderin in some kind of Cross-SLI?

 

Actually i was planing to do exactly this - buy a passive 9500GT as a PhysX accelerator. Then i found out this issue and the result is not what NVIDA expects - i didn't bought the 9500GT, but neither will buy a GT2xx or GT3xx (when it will arrive). So they didn't got extra 300e which i'm going to spend on HD5870, but they also lost ~50e for 9500GT i didn't bought.

 

Check out the Lucid Hyrda 200 chipset.

 

Bonus my ass! They actively advertise it and use it to make themselves look superior "Ooooh our video cards support PhysX, can yours?".

Alas, that's the way of the fanboy, when it's good for them, then X feature is THE BEST in the world but when it hurts them/makes them look bad then it's a "just a bonus", give me a f***ing break

 

Although I'm an Nvidia fan, I find this decision very unfair on those who want to use ATI GPUs for rendering. Nvidia will not make any money from this: in fact, they will lose money from ATI users who would consider having a dedicated Physx card.

To be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing ATI suddenly emerge with a better alternative to Physx just to teach Nvidia a lesson!

 

While I agree that PhysX has a limited life in its current form with Direct Compute and OpenCL ready for adoption, I still don't see why Nvidia have to cater to ATI owners frankly. Nvidia are not forcing you to buy their cards. If you dont like their practices or the developers that include PhysX in their games then do not buy those games.. However games like Batman Arkham Asylum and Mirrors Edge are starting to show that PhysX as a technology has promise.

If I was Intel I would absolutely NOT help AMD with their GPU's and to be honest I think this is why there are next to no games announced using AMD GPU accelerated Havok. Remember that Intel has just ponied up over a billion Euros because of AMD and the Antitrust case.

Why in hell would they help AMD GPU's is beyond me.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if PhysX actually dies out or to save face - become like Havok. Still, nVIDIA won't be getting my money.

 

I'm not an nVidia fanboy and I don't think PhysX is anywhere near as useful/awesome as nVidia wants to make it look. If AMD got their acts together and finally started pushing OpenCL they way it deserves to be they'll finally catch up with nVidia in that field as well. They're already in the lead when it comes to performance/price and driver support lately.

I'll build a new PC around/shortly after Christmas and right now it looks like AMD might be the company to receive most of my money.

If you're trying to say PhysX is a main selling point for most nVidia customers though, you're either blind or lying to yourself. It's a gimmick. Nice to have but not the dicisive feature. End of story.

 

Wow, Slashgear covered this story, what, eight weeks after it happened? Definitely a bit slow there I think. End of July that thread was made.

Anyway, I don't like that nVidia are doing the naughty and locking PhysX out - but they are entirely within their rights to, they own the tech. Still, it seems what they're trying to do is force people to upgrade from nVidia hardware to nVidia hardware (using the older card as a dedicated PhysX card) which might well backfire. Time will tell, however.

Regardless, so long as you don't use the latest drivers, you can get away with ATi graphics and nVidia PhysX - to the best of my knowledge, the 182.xx drivers still allow the use of PhysX when an ATi card is present as the graphics card.

 

my thoughts exactly, especially as i'm one of those ATI users who was considering getting a GeForce card just for PhysX. Now though, you can bet i'm not going to run nVidia cards only in my system just so i can have PhysX, i'm just not going to bother at all. It would have been a far better decision strategically to allow it, as it opens up an entire new market to nvidia which they now will never have

Lets see how quickly nvidia backpedals on this after finding out what proportion of ATI owners were willing to by a GeForce card to just get physx

 

I'll have to give that ago, I just can't help but think that they'll lose custom over this.

 

Dont know why Nvidia did that, seeing as nvidia said at the start when physx appeared, that they would be happy to let ATI use there cuda/physx software for nothing !

On a seperate note i tried to use my old 8800 ultra as a physx card along with gtx 280 for a gpu and couldnt make it work, my PSU is only 700W would that be the problem ? Ive looked all over nvidia's site for a guide but cant see anything.