Nvidia pulls a 'dick' move with their PhysX support.

Posted By: Steve McBarnes - 03:01:21 Fri, September 25, 2009

Apparently since the 186 GeForce drivers, Nvidia has disabled PhysX processing if an AMD video card is being used for the graphics processing. That is just not cool at all. I agree with Unknown-One's statement, "Ok, so don't support it, but don't go out of your way to disable it!". If this was my decision, I would make sure that PhysX works very well in this configuration so that the user can see the value in my company's technology. Perhaps then the user might be presuaded to buy a video card from Nvidia the next time around. What do you guys think?

Here is Nvidia’s customer care center entry about this situation:

Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs.

13 Comments

Friday, September 25, 2009 7:39:17 PM

anonymousD
n00b

read about it..very very smart.....

but then again...read up on the lucida as it was mentioned before...ahem ahem....should take the nvdia out of them :p

Friday, September 25, 2009 9:00:09 PM

McArthur
n00b

Making things even MORE proprietary huh?

Friday, September 25, 2009 11:16:51 PM

Casecutter
Member

It's the Green Mentality. Similar o what they do in the Batman: Arkham Asylum Game... Read about down below this

Hitler, as Nvidia's CEO, gets informed about ATI's Evergreen series (Warning - NSFW)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FR45ja_fNzU

Saturday, September 26, 2009 8:50:51 PM

This kinda mess makes me want to move to an ATI card instead of Nvidia.

So they basically just alienated any customer with a ATI card who might have bought a lower end Nvidia card for dedicated PhysX. How does that help them?

If I have an Nvidia chipset and nTune, can't I just turn it back on?

Sunday, September 27, 2009 2:26:58 PM

arrogant bunch of tools, ATI definitely the good guys here

Sunday, September 27, 2009 8:00:51 PM

hdantman
Senior Member

Such a dumb move.

Sunday, September 27, 2009 11:03:27 PM

Tofuman88
n00b

Yeah Lucid Hydra 200 platform will take a bite out of their coffers for once...if it works :) I simply find it amazing and quite intriguing to see an nvidia gpu and an ati gpu as bedfellows in say the new "Big Bang" motherboard from MSI coming soon apparently, some new base, is it H57? I cant remember because I read the article a day ago lol...stupid Organic Chemistry keeps my mind from remembering...screw you benzene rings!

Monday, September 28, 2009 11:25:45 AM

-RK
Senior Member

Hmm, now the really smart move for ATI would be to pull an open source physics engine that their cards support out of their asses. That would make things mighty interestin' for Nvidia.

Here's hoping.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 12:52:36 AM

anonymousD
n00b

looks like the tables are shifting..hope nvidia doesnt go belly up or well be screwed in the long term

Tuesday, September 29, 2009 12:55:20 PM

-RK
Senior Member

I disagree anon. I don't think NV is in the business danger zone, but even if NV did go belly up and ATI jacked prices without competition we'll see someone step in to undercut them.

Ugh, I perferred to use nvidia chips up until recently even though they've done shady things in the past, but after reading up on this I'm actually neutral to the concept of NV dying as a company.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009 11:25:44 AM

Nasty move proving that nVidia is scared by the new king of the hill - ATI's 5870/5850.
It's aim at the current low/mid nVidia users with cards like 8800/9600/9800 gama who were considering getting one of the new Radeon and keeping the old nVidia card mainly for things like PhysX... and now they are screwed.
Don't know if it's a legal move but it surely ain't nice.

Thursday, October 01, 2009 2:08:47 PM

Casecutter
Member

They need to get back to doing things right and Fermi appears to give them lot's of good stuff; although they better get it right or they might be shut out. Allowing an opening to finally having AMD and Intel doing battle on the graphics world. Nvidia not having an license x86, Larabee, Amd is fence sitting with the Havok and more and more eye OpenCL , Ray tracing, all that is making for a more and more isolated future for Nvidia. I read a fairly recent article on of all this and how it intertwines and now I can't find it was not so much a story on the demise of Nvidia, but talk that Jen-Hsun Huang is work into new areas of technology and that he may move the company focus from chipsets and graphics.

Monday, October 05, 2009 1:28:18 PM

anonymousD
n00b

ive seen posts of fermi beeing a fake...hmmm

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