The new PhysX support Nvidia has been working on to bring to its new GeForce 9800 and GTX 200 series graphics cards has created a lot of buzzing lately, especially with some voices that accuse the Santa Clara company of cheating on the 3DMark Vantage scores. After all, as the rumors proved to be false, the PhysX implementation seems to interest others as well, and the ATI graphics cards should be included on the list.

ATI-accelerated PhysX would be a part of the future, and the reasons for this are quite simple. Next-generation games will require PhysX support on the graphics cards, and, since Nvidia eliminated the need of a PPU, AMD needs to strike back. Besides, as the parallel computing makes its way to the market, powerful GPUs able to off-load the workload from the CPU - providing, this way, better performance - are being designed by all manufacturers. The graphics processors are believed to have more work capabilities comparing to the CPUs, and ways of making them "work harder" need to be found.

There is not much information we can provide about the screenshot above, but everyone can see what it is supposed to show, and that is PhysX being accelerated on a Radeon HD 3800 GPU, namely a 3850. The group of people that managed to bring to us the well known "SLI Patch" is now trying to develop an application capable of porting NVIDIA's PhysX to ATI graphics cards. The guys from NGOHQ.com say that, unfortunately, the application will only work on the 3800 series for now. They say that, "sadly, the HD 4800 family won't be supported, because AMD thinks NGOHQ.com is not worthy enough to borrow review samples". AMD surely makes a mistake here, but we can hope that things will change soon enough and that PhysX support for the 4800 series will not be waited too long.

The development of applications capable of porting PhysX support to other graphics cards than Nvidia's is something we should have been expecting, and some are already pretty much excited about it. Even Nvidia agrees to the idea, and, at a recent event, some representatives from the GPU manufacturer, when asked about porting PhysX to ATI GPUs, said that the CUDA SDK can be downloaded by anyone interested to do the necessary work.