14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA acquired PhysX when it bought Ageia in 2008. Since then, the GPU maker has been advertising this technology and has been showing benchmarks that suggest that the GPU has performance advantages over the GPU in this area. In an interview with Bit-tech.net, AMD’s Worldwide Developer Relations Manager, Richard Huddy, “takes a pop” at NVIDIA by openly questioning the current state of PhysX and the lack of multi-core optimizations.
“All these CPU cores we have are under-utilised and I'm going to take another pop at Nvidia here. When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multi-core implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores,” Huddy says.
“I wonder why Nvidia has done that? I wonder why Nvidia has failed to do all their QA on stuff they don't care about – making it run efficiently on CPU cores – because the company doesn't care about the consumer experience it just cares about selling you more graphics cards by coding it so the GPU appears faster than the CPU. It's the same thing as Intel's old compiler tricks that it used to do; Nvidia simply takes out all the multi-core optimizations in PhysX.”
Huddy even goes on to say that the central processor is actually capable of handling most of the physics in games. “If coded well, the CPU can tackle most of the physics situations presented to it. The emphasis we're seeing on GPU physics is an over-emphasis that comes from one company having GPU physics... promoting PhysX as if it's God's answer to all physics problems, when actually it's more a solution in search of problems.” Huddy adds.
NVIDIA is currently the most popular brand when it comes to playing games with physics, but Advanced Micro Devices is already working with companies to bring out such products of its own. “We're working on two thrusts of physics which are very important and also the three companies on enabling GPU physics,” Mr. Huddy shares.
In the same interview, Huddy speaks of some of the company's plans for the ongoing year. He also says that he doesn't expect AMD to always have the fastest card during 2010, but that it will, graphically wise, dominate most of the year.