Why does nvidia not let physx work with a ATI card now.

[john19055]

I just can't believe nvidia is that worried about ATI .Even I was thinking about getting a HD5870 and use one of my nvidia cards for PhysX ,but it looks like with the new drivers nvidia put a stop to that .If you want to use a old nvidia card for your PhysX ,you better have a nvidia card as your primary card.This to me looks to hurt nvidia ,what did they have to worry about ,don't they have a big enough market share as it is.

[AthlonXP1800]

No, Nvidia not worried about ATI. It because ATI didnt wanted their cards to take or share advantage of physx driver, ATI is against physx so they wanted Havok, OpenCL and Direct Compute.

[jolle]

Officially its for compatibility reasons, they cant ensure stability with users mixing and matching ATi and NV GPUs, and different combinations of the drivers for each.
And ontop of that running rendering and physics split between theirs and someone elses driver.

I would guess there is some truth to that, but I dont think NV is loosing any sleep of it either.
I guess they´re hoping that the sales lost from ATi users wanting a NV GPU for physX are made up by ATi users replacing their main card with a NV one or something.

As for ATi not supporting PhysX in general, thats simly that they would only strengthen their competitors propriety API, CUDA, if they were to support that, and they really dont stand to gain anything from that.
Besides, with Havok coming in with GPU support via OpenCL (which can potentially run on any sort of device, CPU, GPU, CELL, DSP etc), PhysX will prolly have to move over to OpenCL to compete, with that large a target audience OpenCL powered physics middleware would have over a CUDA powered one.

[ATi]

why do people keep making thread's about this?

[JH24]

So it was once possible to use a Nvidia card for Physx with an ATI card? Interesting.


I do understand Nvidia’s decision though. People could simply buy an AMD card and give their previous Nvidia card a second life for Physx instead of buying a new card from them. But maybe having two different cards would have given problems in the long run.


It’s too bad though, I’m interested in an AMD card (Really hoping Nvidia will show something soon, they need to convince people to wait a little longer for their cards, including me) and I had been playing with the idea to use my current Nvidia card as a secondary card for Physx.

[CaptNKILL]

Its a good decision at this point IMO.

Its obvious that they're doing it on purpose or at least neglecting to make both cards compatible... but can you blame them?

They have a few really nice features going for them that work great on a mid range or last generation GPU. Physx and CUDA. If they allowed those GPUs to work with ATI's, then they would basically be taking away two of their primary selling points for their high end cards. If the 5870 is priced right, anyone could just buy one of those and keep their existing Geforce without losing any features.