SlashGear JP
I would bet good money that there will be few this little tidbit will affect, but NVIDIA has apparently disabled support for PhysX processing on its GPUs when an ATI GPU is present. This would only affect users who have an NVIDIA card installed for PhysX and an ATI card for graphics.
A poster on the NGOHQ forums received an email reply from NVIDIA support explaining the issue. NVIDIA says in part that the issue had to do with some “business reasons” along with quality assurance reasons. This apparently happens with version 186 and newer drivers.
The full email reads:
“Hello JC,
Ill explain why this function was disabled.
Physx is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. 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. I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused but I hope you can understand.
Best Regards,
Troy
NVIDIA Customer Care”
4 Responses to “NVIDIA disables PhysX support when ATI GPU is installed”
Nope, I don’t really understand. If you had just told me it wouldn’t work that way I probably would have, but It really just sounds like illegal business tactics to me. To disable portion of your product because one is also using a competitors product instead of another product of your own. That’s shady.
+3bbbl67 September 27, 2009
Hey, let’s say you have bought a motherboard with an integrated chipset from ATI? You then decide you want to upgrade the video and buy an Nvidia video card? Now you still have an ATI GPU onboard the chipset, but it’s not being used anymore since you now have an Nvidia video card. Will this mean that Nvidia will still turn off physics due to the little integrated non-Nvidia GPU that still there? This is possibly a class-action suit waiting to happen.
+1Notneeded September 28, 2009
I currently use an ATI 4830, but I also have an 8800GS. You can be sure my next card will be an AMD. You might say I am disabling NVIDIA for “business reasons.”
+3bbbl67 September 28, 2009
With the way the new Radeon 5800 series seem to be performing, you probably don’t even need a “business reason” to go with it.
+1