NVidia Considering Porting PhysX To OpenCL

arcticstoat writes "NVidia has revealed that it's considering porting its PhysX API to OpenCL to allow PhysX GPU-acceleration on competitors' graphics cards as well. At the moment, a GPU needs to support NVidia's CUDA technology in order to accelerate PhysX on the GPU, and ATI has so far declined NVidia's offer to get CUDA working on ATI GPUs. NVidia's director of product management for PhysX, Nadeem Mohammad, said, 'In the future it's a possibility that we could use OpenCL' for PhysX, adding, 'If we start using OpenCL, then there's a chance that the features would work on ATI, but I have no idea what the performance would be like.'"

Comments

Re:Competition is good.. for us

[Elledan]

Yeah, we can experience the good ol' days of OpenGL vs D3D vs Rendition vs Glide all over again. Colour me excited. Or not.

While competition may sound nice, for game developers (of which I am one) and gamers alike, in the end the goal is to be able to make or play a game without having to consider a zillion different rendering/physics/sound APIs, including the many limitations only supporting one of them may bring with it. We should be grateful that we are now left with 2 rendering APIs (OGL and D3D) which all cards (more or less) support. Let's hope that the same thing happens for physics really soon. It seems that nVidia is at least attempting to make this happen, which is encouraging.