Nvidia, which once said it would enable processing of physics effects made using PhysX API on any GPU, is now doing the opposite.

According to Xbit, the company recently started to disable PhysX support on systems that use ATI Radeon graphics cards for rendering and Ageia PhysX or Nvidia GeForce processors for physics effects computing. While it was not easy to make both ATI Catalyst or Nvidia ForceWare drivers or Nvidia PhysX system software work on the same system, apparently some people had managed it and this annoyed the Green Goblin.

PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it.  An Nvidia service person was quoted as saying that while for a variety of reasons,  some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs.

All this is strange as it has pushed PhysX as an open standard that can be used even by its arch-rival ATI. In fact there is an element of cutting its nose off to spite its face. PhysX support seems now to be limited to the installed base of the GeForce and does not allow to use it on machines featuring even other graphics accelerators. Those who need PhysX should only upgrade to Nvidia graphics boards if keeping the old card for PhysX we guess.