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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."
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.
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.