AMD Touts Physics, Nvidia Disables It

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Written by Chris Tom

Thursday, 01 October 2009 12:20

The Inquirer talks about AMD touting physics on their Radeons. In announcing the initiative, AMD chief graphics technology officer Eric Demers took a swipe at rival Nvidia and its proprietary PhysX engine. "Proprietary physics solutions divide consumers and independent software vendors, while stifling true innovation. Our competitors even develop code that they themselves admit will not work on hardware other than theirs," he said. Meantime at Fudo's Nvidia is disabling PhysX on Radeons. 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. So you better not mix and match. All of this would matter if PnysX did matter, but it does not. They simply didn't listen to me all those years ago in LA. Oh well.