Nvidia fired back at AMD's earlier accusations that it was bribing developers to use its proprietary PhysX technology. Ashutosh Rege, the worldwide director of developer technology at Nvidia, said that the company does provide help to developers who want to implement physics into their games using Nvidia's middleware. However, he was adamant that the company does not-- and cannot-- influence their decision to use PhysX or any other library or engine.
“There could be no deal under which we would cash somebody in for using PhysX,” he told X-bit Labs.
In a nutshell, his response was broken down into several distinct responses: Nvidia cannot force game developers to use PhysX, the company helps implement GPU PhysX, and it does not intentionally lower performance of non-Nvidia platforms-- this was an accusation made earlier this year by AMD.
Rege also pointed out that PhysX is not GLide. "The comparison of Glide against PhysX is not smart," he said, referring to AMD's comparison just days ago. "PhysX is not an API, it is a full set of software, it is a middleware."
Surprisingly, he admits that PhysX isn't a big consideration for game developers, it's not the main deciding factor. "In the middleware business you have game developers saying ‘I’ve got these features, I’ve got these licensing terms and I need to deploy on these platforms. What is the best solution here?’. Of course, the cost of license is also important to developer. Based on all of that, they make their decision what package to choose."
But Rege also pointed out that Nvidia is "happily" working with open-source developers of physics processing tools, even those that use OpenCL or DirectCompute. "If a developer asks us to help implement certain feature, we will add it," he said. "If he asks to port something to DirectCompute, we will certainly do our best to get that to him. […] We will support game developers to the extent of our knowledge of, [for example], Bullet. Obviously, we do not have engineers, who are exposed in Bullet to [provide technical support], but we are working with the Bullet Engine team on specific things. […] At the end, we are selling GPUs, not PhysX."
Ding, round three.