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

Theory versus Practice

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Theory versus Practice

[linhares]

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?

Re:Theory versus Practice

[Midnight Thunder]

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.

Well if NVidia makes a sub-par implementation for competing cards, then NVidia can concentrate their efforts a cross-platform solution, while the competitor's cards are perceived as sub par. NVidia ever gets asked why they didn't do a better implementation, they could then argue this was just a token gesture and not an all out effort. In the meantime OpenCL gets picked up by games developers and NVidia gets a lead while the competition realises they have some catching up to do.

This is sneaky, but the competitors only have themselves to blame if they don't recognise where things are going.

OpenCL?

[mac1235]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

Re:OpenCL?

[Z00L00K]

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

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.

Re:Competition is good.. for us

[Yetihehe]

Yeah, we can experience the good ol' days of OpenGL vs D3D vs Rendition vs Glide all over again. Colour me excited.

glBegin(GL_POST);
glColor3bv((GLbyte *)colour_excited);
glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES, 1, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, get_parent_post(this));
glEnd();
glutPostRedisplay();

Here you go!
(excuse me if there are some errors, I didn't use opengl or c++ in over four years)

It would be a great thing

[iampiti]

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.

Re:Competition is good.. for us

[LoRdTAW]

OGL, D3D etc. are API's just like CUDA and OpenCL. Physics engines as you know are software kits available to game developers to implement in their titles. You should be happy that already the industry is not about to get into the API fight you mentioned. Instead they are readying their software to not only work on their hardware but competitors hardware as well using a common API. Lets all be grateful Nvidia isn't trying to shove CUDA down everyone's throat. With PhysX implemented in OpenCL everyone wins. Nvidia gets to sell more licenses due to their engine working on a wider variety of hardware and gamers don't have to be limited in their hardware selection.

Nvidia moving toward OpenCL is a very good thing. Much better than moving to DirectX 11 GPGPU which limits their software to MS platforms.

Re:Competition is good.. for us

[Quarters]

but that strikes me as very similar to the way Microsoft makes it possible to use OpenGL, but does everything they can to get people to use DirectX.

Really, the OpenGl working group does everything they can to get people to use DirectX. If they would be more nimble in adding new features to the spec things would be a different place. Instead, they move along at a glacial pace and the standard method of spec evolution goes something like this:
* Microsoft announces DirectX n with new features XYZ
* nVidia and ATi release cards that support DirectX n
* A few years later game developers release games that support DirectX n. Some game developers, like iD, work with ATi and nVidia to get OpenGL extensions running on hardware from both IHVs that support the features of DirectX n
* A few years later the OpenGL working group ratifies OpenGL version++ that unifies support for the features of all of the various OpenGL extensions that have been written since the current OpenGL spec was ratified.

While Microsoft's method might be more autocratic than the OGL working group's method it does tend to get new features in the hands of ISVs and consumers more quickly. Plus, it's not like Microsoft dictates everything that goes in to a given DirectX release. They work with numerous ISVs and IHVs to find out what features are being requested.