When NVIDIA bought AGEIA at the beginning of the year, it was widely assumed that NVIDIA would basically implement AGEIA’s existing PPU onto future graphics cards. As the relationship progressed, however, more and more people started to believe that PhysX would end up being primarily a GPGPU application controlled and regulated by software. Beta drivers enabling PhysX through NVIDIA’s CUDA language hit the tubes very recently, and already a crafty individual from NGOHQ.com has managed to adapt the technology to run on ATI Radeon graphics cards.

Regeneration (Eran Bradit) of NGOHQ.com modified NVIDIA’s CUDA and apparently the PhysX driver to run on AMD’s RV670 GPU. The Radeon HD3850 with PhysX enabled permitted the CPU score to increase greatly (as physics calculations were offloaded to the GPU) in 3DMark Vantage, boosting the final score to P4262 from somewhere around P3800. Obviously returns are limited on an older and more mainstream part like the HD3850, but we have no reason to believe that this modification is not possible on the new Radeon HD 4850 and HD 4870 parts. NGOHQ.com was not able to prove it on the new cards because apparently AMD did not want to send them review samples.

It will be interesting to see what NVIDIA’s official stance on licensing PhysX to AMD will be, and if AMD decides to actually adopt PhysX in addition to Havok, which it announced a partnership with earlier this month. Both AMD and NVIDIA were working closely with Havok on their Havok FX technology when AGEIA was just coming into the picture with their PhysX hardware and software. Then, when NVIDIA bought AGEIA, everything changed. So, seemingly AMD video cards will technically be able to support both emerging Physics APIs. Surely NVIDIA will leverage its TWIMTBP campaign to draw in a very strong game developer base for PhysX, but Havok, now under the muscular umbrella of Intel, will probably be an attractive option for major studios as well. Time will tell how this all plays out, but things seem to be looking good for AMD.

Source: NGOHQ.com

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