NVIDIA Supporting PhysX-on-Radeon Effort

NVIDIA’s PhysX technology has been getting a lot of attention lately, and in case you happened to miss our coverage from two weeks ago, be sure not to skip it as we take a hard look at the performance factor, and also see where the technology stands today. But where does ATI fall into the PhysX scheme of things? Well if Eran Badit has his way, ATI cards will soon join NVIDIA’s own and utilize the technology to its full potential.

Around the same time we posted our article, Eran leaked a screenshot that showed PhysX running on an HD 3850, and I immediately assumed NVIDIA was going to jump in and ask for him to remove it. It wouldn’t be the first time the company has asked him to remove certain NVIDIA-related material off of his site, after all, so what’s so surprising now is that the company is actually supporting his endeavour. Impressive.

What’s not impressive is the blatant lack of support from ATI, who likely wishes this would just go away. After all, they recently signed into a cooperation with Intel using their Havok technology, essentially the leading competitor to PhysX, although currently more successful. A software package to support PhysX on ATI is inevitable though, and I’m glad to see it. PhysX can be accelerated using hardware, whereas Havok currently has no such functionality. That in itself puts PhysX in a good place, and adding support to ATI cards is only going to improve the technology and help it grow.

The tone at Nvidia has changed quite a bit over the past week. It appears that Nvidia does not mind running PhysX on ATI Radeon (or just about any other GPU) cards. In fact, Nvidia has opened access to Developer Relations and is providing assistance to Badit, including access to documentation, SDKs and more importantly, hardware and actual engineers.