AMD: Developers Use PhysX Only For The Cash
AMD said that a Nvidia marketing scheme pays game developers to implement PhysX whether they want it or not.
In a recent interview with THINQ, AMD’s senior manager of developer relations Richard Huddy slammed Nvidia and its PhysX technology, claiming that the rival company is forcefully shoving the technology down cash-strapped developer throats and paying them off at the same time. Huddy claims that Nvidia's marketing deal gives it the right to implement PhysX elements into a game whether the developer wants it or not.
According to the interview, Huddy spends a lot of time with developers and has concluded that most do not want Nvidia involved in game development. "The problem with [the marketing deal] is obviously that the game developer doesn’t actually want it," he said. "They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn’t because the game developer wants it in there."
Huddy goes on to claim that developers outside Epic Games don't want to implement GPU-accelerated PhysX into their games. "I’m not aware of any GPU-accelerated PhysX code which is there because the games developer wanted it with the exception of the Unreal stuff," he added. "I don’t know of any games company that’s actually said 'you know what, I really want GPU-accelerated PhysX, I’d like to tie myself to Nvidia and that sounds like a great plan.'"
Of course, Huddy also thinks that AMD's open approach to GPU-accelerated physics will eventually force Nvidia's proprietary PhysX into the virtual graveyard along with A3D and the infamous GLide API. "If you go back ten years or so to when GLide was there as a proprietary 3D graphics API, it could have coexisted, but instead of putting their effort into getting D3D to go well, 3dfx focused on GLide," he said. "As a result, they found themselves competing with a proprietary standard against an open standard, and they lost. It's the way it is with many of the standards we work with."
To read more, check out the interview here.
Nvidia physx? Does it even do anything? I own an nvidia card but I don't care if a game has physx or not.
Sheesh this web site sure has a ton of java errors. I can barely even post half the time.
MMX added a very important instruction set that would vastly increase performance in the areas you're talking about. If a game was made to require a P166mmx, it would be unplayable on a P100 without mmx. It's nothing about trying to force features on people.
Physx allows certain physics effects to be rendered realtime by hardware instead of by using slow software methods. Unfortunately for us, it's an Nvidia-exclusive thing so they basically pay off devs to add it to the game only for Nvidia cards where other cards could realistically do hardware physics for those sometimes-nice effects. Like recently I played Mirror's Edge and saw the physx effects on youtube and some of it looked pretty nice, but certainly no reason to switch from ati to nvidia.
I know... but I found out that.... if I stay away from IE... everything works perfectly no matter is the FireFox or Safari. I guess there is a reason why IE's Acid3 score is so low....;)
There's a significant difference between saying "hey, look at our feature, we think it's pretty good, want to include it?" and saying "hey, we have a couple of moneybags with your name on it if you include this feature that only works with our card." That's what this article is about.
How would you feel if there were games with ATI-exclusive features? Or even literally games that wouldn't work unless you had an ATI card? Obviously that's more extreme, and that couldn't currently happen because marketshare is too spread between the two, but what if someone had 95% of the marketshare and could logistically do such a thing?
I'm not condemning Nvidia by any means, but it's still shady practice and we should be aware of such and not just ignore such things. Nvidia bought the Physx stuff and are now making their return off it. But considering that it's been shown to work fine on ATI hardware in the past (I believe, correct me if I'm wrong), it's essentially paying devs to unlock effects for only their product even though it would work fine with others. This goes much further than say, paying to get the free Nvidia ad in front of the game.
That's because OpenGL was stalled due to a bunch of influencial CAD firms whom wanted to say they were using the latest version of Open GL while doing the minimum amount of work to do so. As a result of that continuous bickering Open GL is too bloated and moves too slow. It is considerably behind DX11 in terms of capability.
Yes it did on Windows, as did IE win over Netscape. But as it is a closed source system as more and more people switch to Macs and Linux then OpenGl will rise from the ashes and regain it's crown. Just as Firefox did against IE. The rise of small Arm based systems with 3D capability will be a boost to the OpenGL devlopers they will have OpenGL ES and where will DirectX be?