Nvidia and ATI – longtime rivals who do not play nice together. Although having both ATI and Nvidia hardware inside a PC is unlikely, there's now clear evidence trouble happens when you put the two together.
Those with the very rare configuration of having an ATI GPU for rendering graphics and a Nvidia chip for processing hardware PhysX will find themselves unable to compute.
Anyone running Nvidia driver version 186 will find PhysX acceleration disabled when ATI hardware is also present in the system, SlashGear reported.
Nvidia customer service responded to a user regarding the issue, saying, "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."
The email continued to list a couple of reasons why the Nvidia GPU would refuse to accelerate PhysX, with one of them being, of course, for business.
"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," it read. "I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused but I hope you can understand."
It's a rare setup and a rare problem – probably affecting only the most hardcore – and it's unfortunate that it's no longer an option for those wanting the best of both worlds.
