AMD being supportive of Physx

[chirop]

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...s-physx-radeon

CONTRARY TO WHAT you may have read around the wibble last week, the folks at DAAMIT are very happy indeed to have Nvidia's Physx standard running on ATI hardware. Mostly.

Whilst the green team has made plenty of hay out of the fact that Nvidia Geforce GPUs can now process physics routines in games like Unreal Tournament 3 (and benchmarks like 3D Mark Vantage), amateur coders have had fun in the past few weeks trying to get the same routines running on AMD hardware - with the full support of Nvidia.

The chaps at *****.com report that they got both software tools and developer assistance time from Nvidia to help get Physx running on ATI hardware - presumably since Graphzilla considers this not just a marketshare bonus for Physx, but a major kick of sand in the face to Howling Hector, Dodgy Dirk and his crew, who not only couldn't afford to buy Ageia, but can barely afford to buy a sandwich at the moment after losing $2.5bn of its $3.2bn of ATI goodwill.

In a bid to get back some goodwill – albeit rather less than a few billion – ATI has now decided to help the amateur coders do their thang.

"We think that it is great that people continue to use our products in creative ways," Julia Clark, AMD PR manager, told Nordic Hardware.

Well, when we say 'help', what we actually mean is that words of encouragement are forthcoming from AMD, even if no practical help is. Well, you have to start somewhere right? With Nvidia and AMD both supporting Physx, could that mean that Intel's Havok standard gets sidelined?

Not if the Greater Spotted 'zilla has anything to do with it. µ


also 2008.07.20 AMD supportive of PhysX on Radeon on Inet
http://personal.inet.fi/atk/kjh2348fs/physx.html

[TDurden]

ATI didn't say they will help. Their response was just polite and diplomatic and the guys who were(successfully)trying to get PhysX working on ATI hardware expressed their disappointment with ATIs response.
However, this is understandable. nVidia owns PhysX. It's not Ageia PhysX anymore, it's nVidia PhysX. The standard is not open and it belongs to nVidia. If ATI starts supporting it, PhysX will likely start to gain huge popularity as the universal standard, but still nVidia will own it.
ATI says physics is not top priority now, but rendering is and they want to move towards open standards for physics processing. And DirectX 11 will support general computing too.
I hope those open standards come to play soon, because nVidia does not want to loose it's investment and is promoting PhysX heavily. Bionic Commando will use it, the new Total War reportedly use it. We will see.
I think in the long run some open universal standard will win, because developers are interested in supporting it and customers want it to. Only the companies itself like nVidia want exclusive standards.

[D3lta]

Old news guy!!! Give-me a fresh food, please..... What happen with ***** team, today?