14 DAY TRIAL // For a long time, consumers have been hoping that a day would come when NVIDIA's GPU PhysX physics processing technology would become supported on ATI Radeon hardware. In fact, in the past, there were even reports that NVIDIA and ATI would work together on developing this. Whatever rumors survived until this day, however, seems to have finally been axed now that NVIDIA has halted support of the middleware on anything besides its GeForce cards, even Ageia physics processing units (PPUs).
Apparently, GPU-accelerated PhysX will, from now on, only be usable with graphics adapters from the GeForce series. Additionally, the technology only reportedly works on NVIDIA graphics chips and, as such, ATI Radeon boards will never be able to take advantage of it. This was subsequently confirmed by the list of supported products published on the NVIDIA PhysX System Software download page.
“The current PhysX driver unfortunately does not support Ageia* PPU hardware which you're already aware. Support for Ageia PPU ended after the 8.xx.xx driver but like you we've receive[d] other users asking to include support in current PhysX releases. There are discussions to release a stand-alon[e] PhysX driver that will support Ageia PPU but that is still in discussion,” an Nvidia technical support specialist is reported to have said.
As it stands, consumers that use Ageia PhysX processors should employ older versions of the PhysX system software, such as 8.09.04. This will enable Ageia PPU acceleration version 2.8.1 SDK, but only on Windows Vista and Windows XP (or older versions). Effectively, this means that PPU support has been dropped for both Windows 7 and software development kits. As for why PhysX GPU acceleration cannot be used when an ATI card is employed for rendering, the company simply states that GPU PhysX relies on a tight collaboration between the two graphics chips.
“There are multiple technical connections between PhysX processing and graphics that require tight collaboration between the two technologies. To deliver a good experience for users, Nvidia PhysX technology has been fully verified and enabled using only Nvidia GPUs for graphics,” an official claim of Nvidia reads.