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Modders Get Nvidia's PhysX To Run On ATI Cards
stress_life writes "Following controversial allegations that Nvidia is cheating in 3DMark Vantage and Unreal Tournament 3 benchmarks, executives from Futuremark and Epic moved forward to clean any confusion.
However, the game was not over — enthusiasts from Israel ported PhysX middleware to run on ATI Radeon cards, achieving remarkable performance. Owners of ATI Radeon cards will be able to play PhysX games as well, such as Ghost Recon 2 and already mentioned Unreal Tournament 3."
Since I tend to use mostly ATI cards, this is great news.
There is no -1 Disagree mod. Slashdot.org/faq defines mod options. USE IT.
Might also find this interesting-- AMD/ATI sure has been having a lot of fun lately.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Larrabee-Ray-Tracing,5769.html
This latest round of cards from Nvidia and ATI seems to have been won by ATI as well. For $300 you can get the AMD 4870, on the performance of the $400 Nvidia 260, and sometimes as good (depending on the game) as the $600 280.
oh wait..disregard that idiotic comment...i misread everything
Sure I grock the term "PPU" and can maybe even imagine it's got some fast elastic particle simmulations.
But what "physics" is really there. What's the interface look like.
Is it real physics? Would it be good for say simmulating chemical dynamics with quantum or classical force fields? COuld I use it to model the hydrodynamics of a sail boat cutting through the water?
What about applied math or engineering physics like say the propagation and attenuation of sound in a turbulent atmoshere or concert hall.
What about a piece of rope falling, a flag in the wind, or a ball and spring model?
Just what does this do and how does the interface look?
if possible compare it to CUDA since I know what that does.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My guess is that nVidia will put a stop to this pretty quickly. PhysX is covered by at least a couple of patents. There may be others pending or that were assigned to nVidia.
I don't know if PhysX is covered by patent protection in Israel, but it's possible. In any event, don't count on official PhysX support from ATI any time soon.
This is hardly the big deal that Nvidia makes it out to be. Physics doesn't come for free on either card. It takes away substantial resources from the GPU's major function of rendering frames. Frankly I don't care how beautiful the physics are when the frame rate is 9.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
since it is in the wild now. who is going to prevent me from fixing the mod ?
Read radical news here
4870 is designed to be cheaper, less energy consuming, less heat producing and scalable.
... nvidia wont be able to fit 2 280 gpus in one card. neither physically a circuit board can take it, nor any pci slot can hold the weight with the added weight of the huge gpus and fan. doing a sli ? no go sir, first, you need HUGE space, second, you need a very powerful psu to support those humongous gpus. and big heat generation and accompanying fans to cool the cards comes with the package. unless you are someone that loves neverending multiple fan hissing at the dead of the night while playing your game, you will be annoyed.
its not as powerful as the 280, BUT, it is designed to be a little bit less powerful.
ati is going the scalability way. because it consumes less energy, costs less, takes up less space, you can get 2 4870s lower than the price of a 280, and get more power with lower energy consumption and heating. this allows you to be able to feasibly scale your graphic needs. need more power ? add a 3rd (you way surpassed 280's power with 2 btw). doing graphic design? why, add a 4th. and this is without speaking of 4870x2 cards that have 2 gpus on 1 card. want more bang ? why sure, your 4870 gpu consumes less watts per gpu power than an 280, therefore you can overclock it much more efficiently without listening to a goddamn fan blowing your brain away with its noise.
nvidia cant do that. they gone the big monolithic gpu way, doing one single, huge, powerful gpu.
it ends up requiring much more power, generating much more heat, taking up SO much space that even single one on a card and its needed stock fan takes up close to 30 cm space
there goes another battle of the graphic cards. from the looks of it, ati not only won big, but also hit it big and made a revolution of sorts - all welcome the era of small but efficient, scalable gpus and neverending modding mania.
Read radical news here
I suspect they'll license it to ATi.
The nVidia people are probably well aware that hogging PhysX to themselves is a stupid idea. Game makers aren't going to go out of their way to support it unless it can be reasonably expected that most gamers will be able to use it. It's a dead fish unless ATi can use it. That doesn't mean they'll just hand it over.
So this whole thing was kicked off by a column on the Inquirer? The same people who brought us the Rydermark "scandal"? The Inq has shown a blatant and consistent anti-Nvidia bias over the years, so why give this any credence?
Besides, the first question that popped into my head is one that is being asked a lot of places, but not answered: If accelerating PhysX on Nvidia's GPU hardware is cheating, wouldn't accelerating PhysX on Ageia's PPU hardware be considered cheating, too? Call me cynical, but I think AMD knows the answer to that, and would rather you didn't mention it, thank you very much.
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and it only took 5 mins, what did we learn?
Is it real physics? Would it be good for say simmulating chemical dynamics with quantum or classical force fields? COuld I use it to model the hydrodynamics of a sail boat cutting through the water?
No. Most physics middleware provide a simplified model (collision detection, rigid body physics, etc...) which is great for visual gimmicks in games, but is too much an approximation to be used in research. You would need other engines which are optimized to do accurate physics modelling - Gromacs comes as an example.
Now about the hardware behind this : Ageia's PPU could in theory be used to accelerate research calculation. The problem is the lack of a proper API. This processor has only PhysX as available API which is specialized for gaming oriented physics. The SieveC compiler is supposed to be able to generate parallel programs for the PPU but hasn't been released publicly.
Whereas, even if the GPU port of PhysX is only oriented for gaming-specific applications, ATI Radeon card also expose the much more general purpose API "Brook+" (the usage of which is already demonstrated in Folding@Home) and nVidia card have CUDA that you know.
Unlike PhysX, those API expose generic numerical methods and can be used to calculate applications as diverse as you mention. Including calculating the game-specific Ageia PhysX.
PhysX is to CUDA what, for example, Gromacs could be compared to Fortan. The first is a specific engine which is optimised to solve some very specific problems, the second is a general purpose language that can be used to crunch numbers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
PhysX will die sooner or later. How many new games do you see being released with Glide support?
Obviously they can't incorporate this into their drivers, but one has to wonder how much they'll look the other way on this. Do they have any legal obligation to stop users from exploiting this (ie. modify their drivers to prevent such mods)? You can be sure they would go out of their way to stop something like that from happening in the other direction.
Relevant original phrase: All's fair in love and war.
Relevant original phrase with 21st century spin: All's fair in love and war so long as you don't knowingly infringe on existing copyrights or patents.
Seriously, maybe than the UT3 Linux client would be possible...
Or it took 1 minute, plus 4 more for Slashdot to allow him to comment again.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Get rid of the 'hardhack' tag people. Sheesh. It's just software. There is no hardware hacking involved.
Not exactly true, they could already play the games with an ATI card, just not with physx enabled
On a side note, Sir Issac Newton would be proud of these Israelis and their accomplishment of bringing 9.8m/s^2 constant acceleration to ATI gamers.
CUDA has not been ported to ATI cards. I think this story is a fake.