NVIDIA might port PhysX over to the new industry standard: OpenCL.
There's been so many lawsuits thrown around between AMD/ATI, Intel and NVIDIA that sometimes it's hard to see when something actually good rocks up - and this is just one of those.
PhysX is currently NVIDIA's proprietary tech, acquired when they bought out Ageia in February 2008, and runs on all their GPUs from the 8-series upwards.
Where it hasn't and doesn't work is ATI cards, as the API isn't compatible in the state it is now, and rather is based around CUDA-esque programming.
Bit-tech had a chat to the developer of NVIDIA's new APEX tools (a set of programs intended to make utilisation of PhysX in games easier for devs), and found that they're interested in potentially using OpenCL in the future:
"In the future it's a possibility that we could use OpenCL, at the moment CUDA works great."
Porting their app to OpenCL would mean that it can run on any GPU that supports the standard - including all of ATI's current lineup, and even integrated graphics chips on mobos (though who would want to run PhysX on these wimpy chips we'll never know).
Head to Bit-Tech for a read, and give us a yell for what you think NVIDIA is going to do - give up their PhysX stranglehold, or share around the physic-love?
Issue: 109 | February, 2010