In a bold statement, Godfrey Cheng, Director of Technical Marketing for AMD's Graphics Product Group, has gone out and said that PhysX is likely to die as long as it remains a closed standard. There might be some truth in this, but with the recent support from more game manufacturers, it might not be quite as bad as AMD thinks.

Bit-tech has an interesting piece on the subject and they've got several quotes from Godfrey Cheng explaining why he thinks PhysX is set to fail. He's quoted saying, "There is no plan for closed and proprietary standards like PhysX, as we have emphasised with our support for OpenCL and DX11, closed and proprietary standards will die."

Considering the wide support not only in PC games, but also in consoles for PhysX, this might be a premature statement. It's not that we don't agree with Godfrey Cheng on the matter of closed standards being a generally bad thing, but sometimes these standards become the industry standard and then everyone that doesn't have a license has to pay up to get a slice of the action.

Godfrey Chengs continues, "We view Havok technologies and products to be the leaders in physics simulation and this is why we are working with them. Games developers share this view." Although Havok has had some success, the Havok physics engine doesn't support hardware acceleration, which makes it less appealing than PhysX if there's enough computational power left in the GPU to offload the CPU when it comes to physics calculations.

On the matter of hardware accelerated physics, Godfrey has this to say: "It should be noted that title support for GPU accelerated physics simulation is NOT the end game. The end game is having GPU physics as an integral part of game play and not just eye candy. If it is optional eye candy, GPU physics will not gain traction." We have to agree with him on this point, as eye candy is nice, but it's not the most important part of a game; and Valve has proven in Half Life 2 that decent physics can be done really well without hardware acceleration.

We doubt that PhysX will disappear anytime soon, but AMD does have some points and we're all for open standards.

You can find the full article here