14 DAY TRIAL // Nvidia seems to have decided it's time to make a new tactical move in the already announced war on the graphics cards market. What's coming this time is Santa Clara's direct help for third party modders which started the operation of bringing PhysX processing to AMD graphics cards. Nvidia surely enjoys this as it is an excellent way to promote its PhysX API.
Since it acquired Ageia back in February, Nvidia has been working hard on integrating PhysX support onto its cards, and it has already succeeded in doing so with its latest GT200 core graphics boards. Also, the company announced that it would bring PhysX support to all the GeForce 8-series and above cards in the next few months.
Nvidia's move to help the porting of PhysX to AMD's cards may also be seen as a way to counterattack Intel's Havok physics API, which has already been licensed for AMD's Radeon graphics cards, and brought Havok acceleration to them. Yet, AMD was rumored to try developing its own PhysX a few weeks ago.
The third party modders are the guys from NGOHQ, and they have already presented to us some progress in the process of porting Nvidia's CUDA based PhysX API to work on AMD Radeon graphics cards. There's no doubt that Nvidia is more than delighted to see its API working on cards made by its strongest competitor, not to mention the threat it may represent to Havok.
An article published yesterday on NGOHQ reveals a positive situation. Although AMD still refuses to provide access to any HD 4800 hardware, the support from other people allowed to almost complete its CUDA Radeon library. All that is left to do, besides the huge amount of work the porting requires, it to convince AMD to aid the project, since its approval is mandatory at "developer and PR level". CUDA support must be added on AMD's driver level, too.
The fact that AMD does not support NGOHQ's work is rather annoying, since this may prove to be a very good thing for PC gaming. While having different types of physics API would require developers to choose one of them, the support of the PhysX on AMD and Nvidia graphics cards would eliminate this step. The latest actions in the graphics industry have fragmented the physics market, and this should make us worry. Through NGOHQ's efforts, the situation could be simplified both for developers and consumers.