News Nvidia considers porting PhysX to OpenCL

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardware/2009/03/27/nvidia-considers-porting-physx-to-opencl/1

Nvidia reveals that shifting PhysX to OpenCL is a possibility in the future, enabling owners of ATI cards to use PhysX too.

 

NV has a strong arm with ~65% of the market, but that's still virtually half of the market for something that takes a full development process. For things like physics, it makes so much more sense for developers to work on something that 100% of the market can use. Otherwise, we would see games "ATI compatible" or "NVDIA compatible", just like we see "MACOS compatible". And we all know how developers love porting over to mac in a timely fashion... :x

 

Obviously a step in the right direction.

 

The whole QA argument seems dumb, either its transparent to the game and it works or they have to bodge it per game and its dirty and underhand (hi 3dmark).

 

I think developers will use havok in opencl since that runs similar effects on both cards instead of only 65% of the market. When that happens nvidias hand will be forced

 

Mentai: the point is that if Nvidia moves PhysX to OpenCL, it'll run on any hardware supporting OpenCL.

 

sound like nvidia still pretty confident on their superiority, but like to have work on the same playing field with AIT... which could either mean they're lying or they're cocky.

but it's a step in the right direction indeed.

 

oh yeah forgot about 3dmark physx cheats XD course don't bother bring that up to a fanboy.. he'll whine till the cows come home

 

It was inevitable really, love the barbed comment about ATI's hardware, "GPU computing solution is probably a couple of generations behind ours.” It sounds like a huge gap, yet in the graphics card world, two generations is probably less a year!

 

there must be some trickery in this, making ATI cards go slower than nVidia counter parts for example.

or why did nVidia acquire PhysX in the first place? what profit have they gained?

 

I can understand the QA argument, in that the physx stuff will have to be verified that it works on both nvidia and ati hardware, to ensure that there isn't something different with the ati implementation of openCL

 

If they don't QA on other hardware and things don't run on ATI cards, it's the same as keeping it under CUDA and not spending a dime.

 

lol they are considering it more like have no choice unless they want to put all that wasted money down the drain

 

They can't keep it proprietary for too long.
A LOT of peope don't run Nvidia cards, and devs are not going to program just for Nvidia.
They do some 'extras' specifically for Nvidia, but they paid for it.

ATI and Intel will do havok over OpenCL, and Nvidia will be left with Cuda and PhysX.

If they do write code for ATi, it will be abysmally optimised, and ATi probably knows that.
Nvidia isn't exactly trustworthy when it comes to drivers and 'optimizations'.....

 

I think they are trustworthy. They have great relationships with other companies. For instance, Intel.

 

i dunno, with havok being OpenCL, and i assume running equally well on ATi and Nvidia stuff, they would have to do a decent job of having physx run on both
if you're a game developer and you're looking for a physics engine are you gonna pick the one that only runs properly on half the graphics cards out there or the one that runs well on both?

also it cant possibly be a coincidence that they reveal this so soon after the havok/opencl announcement

 

lol

 

Well, Nvidia certainly has its head up its arse.

 

I think that I'll survive with my "couple of generations behind" ATI Radeon HD 4870x2, lol

 

I think this is something that could benefit everyone, if PhysX will work on every new GPU being made they'll be more likely for developers to buy into it.