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NVidia Considering Porting PhysX To OpenCL

Posted by Soulskill on from the learning-to-share dept.

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.'"

5 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Theory versus Practice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    OpenCL is low leve enough that it's certainly possible to write code that works on other hardware in theory while being far too slow to do anything useful in practice.
    Knowing NV, I wouldn't be surprised to see this happening

    1. Re:Theory versus Practice by linhares · · Score: 2, Interesting
      I'm REALLY looking forward to opencl adoption. I'm working on AI, and I have to do things as simple as getting the hamming distance between two bitstrings, or adding +1 into xi for all i in a large vector. These are trivial, but I have to do them on (at least) a million different vectors at each operation. I'm dreaming that opencl will make this thing smoother.

      But then we get to the politics of the whole thing, and it's kind of depressing. Apple sends it to the Khronos group, which makes it a standard, but Microsoft, SURPRISE!, immediately announced a competing thing. So we run the risks of not having our stuff running in everybody's machines. Or we are stuck in the Apple arena.

      Since I'm planning on spending USD$2000 for a video card if only we can get the code right, I'm most likely building a Hackintosh, because of Apple's heavy handed nickel-and-diming-in-every-component-for-your-bestest-experience.

      I want to be cross-platform. So here's a question: Does anyone knows how opencl is supposed to work in windows or linux?

    2. Re:Theory versus Practice by drerwk · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Sign up for ADC (for $500) and use the hardware discount. It'll be about 20% off the Apple retail price and you get all the latest developer goodies. If you intend to use OpenCL and the latest Apple OS, the only reason to build a Hakintosh is if your time is free. If that is the case then no problem. But I can't see running into a problem and sitting there wondering - is it Apple's new OpenCL, or is it my machine? And if you are ADC, then you can send Apple a trouble ticket - and maybe even get an answer.

  2. Re:OpenCL? by Z00L00K · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thanks! - I first thought that it was a misspelling of OpenGL.

    --
    If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
  3. It would be a great thing by iampiti · · Score: 2, Interesting

    A standard (even if it's a de facto one) API for physics would mean more developers would consider it and gamers would be happy because it'd work with all cards.
    I guess Nvidia would gain money through licensing and AMD/ATI...I don't know, do they stand to lose anything because of this?
    Besides that, physx is available for the PS3 and (I believe) the Wii so it would be a (more or less) universal API for physics acceleration.