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.