Physx is not going to kill anyone... it's dx10.1 all over again. No one is going to make/sell a game relying on this thing if it's gonna screw over a good portion of the market, or leave them left out of any significant part of the game. Unless AMD/ATI support physx it will never be anything more than optional eyecandy and that limited role will limit it as a factor for people to might buy into it (would you pay $500 for a new card instead of $300 so you can get more broken glass?).
Some of you are talkiing about studios and games adopting physx but what have you seen so far? Mirror's edge seems to do a bit of showcase work for physx but how many would really buy that game? Being an EA game through and though I personally have a hard time believing the game would offer anything more than what I could get watching the trailer or some demos. Otherwise I haven't seen physx do anything that havok wasn't already doing. There's no extra edge here. There's probably some incentives from Nvidia - but then that comes back to what this guy was saying in the first place;
"We cannot provide comments on our competitor's business model except that it is awfully hard to sustain support by monetary incentives. The product itself must be competitive. 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."
This lends itself to why this stuff won't kill ATI... end of the list is Apple, didn't they put together the OpenCL standard? Which do you think they'll be pushing, CUDA or their own standard? Microsoft will be pushing it's own thing with DX11 down the road. Adobe recently took advantage of Nvidia's CUDA and ATI's Stream if I'm not mistaken... but do you think they'll want to keep on making 2 versions of their products when other people are pushing for a unified standard?
I guess this is all moot anyways then... if AMD responding to an Nvidia announcement for a reporter will guarantee success for Physx then surely the grandstanding Nvidia took part in vs. Intel will have Larrabee burying all competition.
At the end of the day people may not like what this guy is saying, why, or how, but it's true. AMD is not going to support Nvidia's proprietary APIs (and why the hell would they?), and with out that support other companies will have less incentive to get on board unless Nvidia provides it. That requires either a superior product or probably cash incentive. Now realisticly.. when the immediate alternatives to Nvidia's systems seem to be OpenCL (Apple - but open), DirectX 11 (Microsoft), and Havok (Intel), do you think these other standards won't have the resources behind them to provide both those things moreso than Nvidia? If you were in AMD's shoes who would you side with? They could do all but seriously... why? It'd just confuse other efforts and probably waste their own resources, and for what? To better prop up the competition that they can beat? So they can claim some moral high ground when they recall how Nv made DX10.1 completely moot?
All that falls appart from the simple fact that, had Ati adopted PhysX when Nvidia gave it for free. Or at least when the guy at
NGOHQ already made PhysX on Ati cards* possible, then we would already have games with 10 times better physics. The point of "Game developers are not supporting it because it doesn't run on all cards." loses it's value, when that is your own fault, when you have obstructed all efforts for the thing running in your cards.
And the one "We are not going to follow a standard that only few developers have adopted" is hypocrit at best, when you are doing as much as you can for that to be true. This falaceous comments included.
It's a lame path the one that AMD has taken. As I said I have lost any faith in them, and the worst thing is that they sided with the most dangerous and "evil" company, Intel, and once Intel has their GPU they are going to crush them so hard it's going to hurt us as well. As a popular quote says: "One must never rely on alliances with the powerful, they probably want something more of that allegiance than help us."
*What can be read in that thread is not the end of story. Nvidia ended up supporting 100% that guy's efforts, but obviously it's not at their hands to release such a thing. They could help make it feasible, but not release it. Neither the guy can release that, remember the guy releasing Vista drivers for X-Fi cards. AMD on the other hand negated any help to the guy, not even providing a simple single HD4000 card for testing. Furthermore the thing went to shadows suddenly, probably, because AMD (or Intel due to AMD's deal with Havok) threatened him with litigations. After that and under a judge's mandate he probably can't say anything about the issue...
I would like to update you about what’s going on. First, we were very pleased to see so many users and readers have applied to our Beta Test Program! To be specific: 191 users, 5 spies and 2 double agents have submitted applications during the last week. Those that will be chosen will be informed early before the beta is available – we can’t still point to “when” at this stage.
The bad news is we still don’t have access to any HD 4800 hardware yet. It is very important for this project to receive AMD’s support on both developer and PR levels. It seems that AMD still is not being cooperative, we get the feeling that they want this project to fail. Perhaps their plans are to strangle PhysX since AMD and Intel have Havok. We truly hope this is not the case since “format wars” are really bad for the consumers (For example: Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD).
Before we get to the good news, I’m going to ask you to hold on to something steady as some of you are going to feel a bit dizzy after you hear this. The truth is… Nvidia is now helping us with the project and it seems they are giving us their blessings. It’s very impressive, inspiring and motivating to see Nvidia's view on this. Why they help us? My best guess would be: They probably want to take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel.
Some other good news, we are getting a lot of help from cool journalists like Theo Valich to address the HD 4800 access issue. I can confirm that our CUDA Radeon library is almost done and everything is going as planned on this side. There are some issues that need to be addressed, since adding Radeon support in CUDA isn’t a big deal - but it’s not enough! We also need to add CUDA support on AMD’s driver level and its being addressed as we speak.
And since then AFAIK nothing.
) where as NVidia is on the few but faster road (I am not going into the more complex differences between the 2 deliberatly!), now, with Physx, it will use a proprtion of shaders to get the job done, a GPU running shaders at twice the speed of a competitor I would GUESS is gonna get much better performing Physx, AMD would not want that perhaps?
