Monday, October 5th 2009
Hack Released to Enable PhysX on Windows 7 with ATI GPU Present
For NVIDIA's PhysX technology, it has been a roller-coaster ride since NVIDIA's acquisition of the technology, and its makers. As much as PhysX quickly became one of the important selling-points of NVIDIA's consumer graphics line GeForce, it also had its small share of controversy, linked to market dynamics more than anything. With the technology's port to the GeForce GPU, enthusiasts fancied having the freedom of choice with a primary GPU that is dedicated to rendering 3D graphics, and a second GPU that is just about powerful to assign as a dedicated PhysX GPU.
Although having a powerful ATI Radeon GPU aided by a less-powerful NVIDIA GeForce GPU for PhysX was possible on Windows XP, the succeeding Windows Vista restricted this, by making sure two active display drivers couldn't coexist. Windows 7 removed this restriction, but before you could rejoice, NVIDIA quickly released a driver-level code with its 186 series drivers, that disables NVIDIA PhysX altogether when a GPU from another vendor is coexisting and enabled, even an IGP for that matter. If that wasn't bizarre enough, with the latest drivers, you can't even pair an Ageia PhysX PPU card with an ATI Radeon GPU going about its business. To the rescue comes a soft-modder's nifty bit of software that overrides this restriction from NVIDIA's drivers, so you can use dedicated GeForce PhysX cards on machines with ATI Radeon primary GPUs again. The corrective driver patch comes from tech portal NGOHQ.com community member GenL.
The patch, which you can download here, has been successful so far going by community members' feedback. It lays to rest any argument NVIDIA would like to make about how using dedicated PhysX cards with primary GPUs of your choice (which happen to be an ATI Radeon) would be the end of the world, other than of course, market-dynamics.
Speaking of which, here's NVIDIA's statement on why dedicated PhysX accelerators ought not to work with GPUs from other vendors: "PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. NVIDIA supports GPU accelerated PhysX on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes PhysX a great experience for customers. 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."
Source:
NGOHQ
Although having a powerful ATI Radeon GPU aided by a less-powerful NVIDIA GeForce GPU for PhysX was possible on Windows XP, the succeeding Windows Vista restricted this, by making sure two active display drivers couldn't coexist. Windows 7 removed this restriction, but before you could rejoice, NVIDIA quickly released a driver-level code with its 186 series drivers, that disables NVIDIA PhysX altogether when a GPU from another vendor is coexisting and enabled, even an IGP for that matter. If that wasn't bizarre enough, with the latest drivers, you can't even pair an Ageia PhysX PPU card with an ATI Radeon GPU going about its business. To the rescue comes a soft-modder's nifty bit of software that overrides this restriction from NVIDIA's drivers, so you can use dedicated GeForce PhysX cards on machines with ATI Radeon primary GPUs again. The corrective driver patch comes from tech portal NGOHQ.com community member GenL.
The patch, which you can download here, has been successful so far going by community members' feedback. It lays to rest any argument NVIDIA would like to make about how using dedicated PhysX cards with primary GPUs of your choice (which happen to be an ATI Radeon) would be the end of the world, other than of course, market-dynamics.
Speaking of which, here's NVIDIA's statement on why dedicated PhysX accelerators ought not to work with GPUs from other vendors: "PhysX is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. NVIDIA supports GPU accelerated PhysX on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes PhysX a great experience for customers. 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."
111 Comments on Hack Released to Enable PhysX on Windows 7 with ATI GPU Present
I think Physx will stick around. Perhaps not exactly as it is now, but I don't think it will be dying.
Im no fanboi of PhysX but just with what i see going on i think its gonna stay.
Just because someone hacks something doesn't validate its importance to anyone but the original maker and the hacker himself.
Oh and before anyone goes all Chuck Norris on me I happen to like Physx. I just haven't seen anything to justify a dedicated GPU yet.
As for ATI adopting PhysX, well good they didn't and are persuing open source path, becuse if they did everyone now would have to licence that darn thing.
At least ATi is working an Open standard unlike nV. It'd really suck if everyone started releasing their own personal way of delivering physics. nVidia really didn't need to try and maintain exclusivity with PhysX because their GT200 and G80's did great in the market. Of course that's nV's only card to play now that the HD5xxx's are here, but that's beside the point.:p
Now I think OpenCL & DC are going to squash PhysX out because they're open + they don't have too many voices holding them back like OpenGL, which is the only significant danger with open initiatives such as this.
Just to be clear here, when putting the nVidia with an ATi card do you physically connect them together in a sort of Crossfire/SLI hybrid connection? If not how does it (physically) work exactly? Some pics would be nice. :)
What the frak is wrong with people's memories these days?
1. we want the perf. of Ati's video card but with all the eye candy ( like physx ) , we can't have it and we hate Nvidia , Nvidia sell's their performance more expensive
2. we want a future proof card from Nvidia (dx11 ) but they don't have one , yet
3. we can have a future proof card like 5850/5870 with a 9600GT for physx but again Nvidia doesn't want that
So you see fanboys of both worlds , we hate we can't spend our money wisely , if we go for the dx11 card we could miss out on physx ( rare and bad games but batman is nice ) , if we go for the old gt200 cards we lose on performance and DX11 , so what to choose ?
Now you can understand why some people hate Nvidia so much , they were set with an Nvidia card for physx and Ati's monster 5870 for dx11 , Nvidia is forcing us to buy from them even if they have low performing cards compared to ATI.
I bet the founder of Ageia Physx is kicking himself now for not asking for more money , look how important this has becomed in this war.
Even if people want to buy something from Nvidia now they don't have DX11 , they are less performing , consume more , we know perf. can't get any better than this ( been on the market for some time and drivers are mature ).
I'm not really caring about the consumers right now even though its not right, I'm thinking of devs that are sitting at their desks talking to their bankers in this trap.
Main reason why I don't buy nVIDIA - and the fact the image quality (from my own experiences) is donkey balls compared to ATi.
And you pay the extra price for the extra performance. Its as simple as that. I see alot of bitching about Nvidia for nothing and alot of hate for nothing. The same kinda people will pay a grand for an Intel i7 Xtreme processor but will bitch about paying 100 extra bucks for a better performing Nvidia gpu. All the people complaining that have i7 CPUs in your case should just shut up because your all being hypocrits. If you wanna bitch over Nvidias +5 FPS then put an AMD rig in there and buy an ATI card since its cheaper for only ~5fps less.