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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.
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."
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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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 ]
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.