In an interview with Thinq, AMD Senior Manager of Developer Relations Richard Huddy expressed quite a few doubts about PhysX and offered some criticism over Nvidia's initiatives aimed at spreading the PhysX gospel.

In recent years Nvidia has managed to grab a significant foothold in the developer community, through various programs, ranging from technical support, through marketing to, well you know, cash. However, Huddy believes developers aren't too keen to embrace PhysX, but that they still choose to use it because Nvidia pays them good money to do so.

“The problem with that is obviously that the game developer doesn’t actually want it...They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn’t because the game developer wants it in there,” said Huddy. He also added that Nvidia used its marketing machinery to promote PhsyX titles.

Huddy thinks that very few developers are genuinely interested in PhysX and he is confident AMD's competing GPU-accelerated physics are a viable alternative.

“I think the proprietary stuff will eventually go away,” said Huddy. “When you have an open standard, everyone can join in and everyone can make free and well-informed choices, and it’s not about skewing the market with money.”

Be as it may, Nvidia has managed to bring PhysX to several popular titles, while AMD's GPGPU version of Intel's Havok API is still nowhere to be found. Perhaps AMD should consider paying developers to use it, as it the scheme seems to be working quite well for Nvidia.

More here.