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NVidia Cripples PhysX "Open" API
An anonymous reader writes "In a foot-meet-bullet type move, NVidia is going to disable PhysX engine if you are using a display adapter other than one that came from their company. This despite the fact that you may have an NVidia card on your system specifically to do this type of processing. 'For a variety of reasons some development expense, some quality assurance and some business reasons Nvidia will not support GPU accelerated PhysX with Nvidia GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non-Nvidia GPUs.' Time to say hello to Microsoft dx physics or Intel's Havok engine."
Havok is a better engine anyway.
But that's the problem with corporate buyings anyway. Even if its kinda wrong to stop supporting the other platforms, they have every right to do so.
Worse than that even, this is using your strength in one industry segment (physics acceleration) to support sales of an arguably different segment (graphics acceleration).
First they scoop up PhysX and try to create a market for PPUs. Now the only way PhysX is ever going to get any use is out of pure coincidence. Not the smartest move for Nvidia to make when Ati/AMD is on their heels with a new line of cards.
This phrase "anti-trust", I don't think it means what you think it means.
How are they leveraging a monopoly to gain unfair advantage in a marketplace?
To me it seems more like NVIDIA has finally realized that they *can't* use it to gain unfair advantage so they're dumping it.
No sig today...
Heres some thoughts on the meaning of this. The PC is an open-architecture, you are free to put whatever you want into your machine. If nVidia can dictate what their hardware works with then they are effectively creating a "nVidia-Approved" list of hardware. First step down the slippery slope of closing the PC's openness. In the software world an equivalent would be Windows refusing to connect to network shares that were based off of Samba or the other way around a Windows box refusing connections from Linux machines. Standards apply to hardware as well as software and if any manufacturer gets away with an "approved" list then the platform as a whole will eventually suffer for it.
Shh.
Once the big game engines and physics libraries get generic support for GPU programming through OpenCL, this will all be pretty moot anyway. From what I can tell, the bullet physics library is already developing this, and I am sure closed source competitors are doing that as well. Relying on anything that will only run on a single vendor's hardware is just a losing business proposition (unless that vendor pays you for it, which I guess is how PhysX got going).
Its anti-consumer, but that doesn't trigger an anti-trust charge, they don't have a monopoly.
Why does everyone scream like its illegal when a company does something they don't like? Unless they are king of the hill and using their powers to force others into capitulating with them, its not an issue for the courts. You don't have to buy nVidia. You don't have to use PhysX. You don't have to buy a Voodoo 3 card. Sure a game may only support one of the above, but thats not something that justifies going after nVidia unless they owned the market.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
How can it be anti-trust if (a) they aren't a monopoly, and (b) they are disabling their own hardware ?
If they caused the ATI card to not function then I could understand it, but a secondary function on their own card ?
You express a desire for an API from Microsoft to become dominant?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
No, but you can't blame a company for not wanting to support outdated technology.
That's like complaining that Microsoft won't release security updates for Windows 98. Sure, some people are still using it, and it might work perfectly well for them, but that doesn't mean MS is evil for not patching it.
What about a CRT is outdated? It has better black levels, faster refresh, and higher brightness than an LCD. It's analog but good cabling will still result in a crystal clear image. I think the primary disadvantages of CRTs is that widescreen is so costly as to be impractical. They are heavy. And they suck a lot of power. but in terms of image quality a CRT is still extremely good.
CRTs are "outdated" because businesses want to sell LCDs. Flat and light is sexy. And LCDs sold like crazy back when the image quality was dramatically inferior to a CRT, and it took them years to catch up.
CRT technology is not obsolete, but the marketing of CRTs is dead. If you want to argue that we should use technology based on marketability alone, be my guest. I suspect most slashdotters will rip into you pretty brutally.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
He doesn't care if they are on the up and up, he cares that they (from his point of view) arbitrarily removed functionality, that, for all he could tell, was working just fine. They don't have to be dishonest to make stupid decisions that make them worth avoiding as a supplier.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
That was a ridiculous thing to post.
A CRT doesn't need support, it needs to not be sabotaged.
His glasses don't need support, they need to not be sabotaged.
Not supporting both of them takes more effort than ignoring them.
Competent support of all that hardware would take less space in code than this comment window is high. Going to the trouble to restrict it was much more... *after* the meetings, licenses, and money exchanges had all taken place.
The cynic in me believes that someone with a debugger is probably a single (or two) flipped bit(s) away from a working setup.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.