Game Devs Only Use PhysX For the Money, Says AMD

arcticstoat writes "AMD has just aimed a shot at Nvidia's PhysX technology, saying that most game developers only implement GPU-accelerated PhysX for the money. AMD's Richard Huddy explained that 'Nvidia creates a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.' However, he adds that 'the problem with that is obviously that the game developer doesn't actually want it. They're not doing it because they want it; they're doing it because they're paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn't because the game developer wants it in there.' AMD is pushing open standards such as OpenCL and DirectCompute as alternatives to PhysX, as these APIs can run on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. AMD also announced today that it will be giving away free versions of Pixelux's DMM2 physics engine, which now includes Bullet Physics, to some game developers."

Comments

Re:Is 'Incentivizing' Anti-Competitive?

[KillShill]

Nvidia is very anti-competitive and has been for a very long time.

The recent "making physx stop working when AMD gfx card is present" is just one of the more public outings of their unethical behavior.

I wish someone would expose all of their shenanigans and anti-competitive practices so people can realize how badly these things affect the industry and consumers (ugh, hate that word).

The most recent thing I read about their practices is from the upcoming PC game, Just Cause 2. There's a trailer showing off Nvidia-only effects ...(something which is dead standard DirectX code) and artificially blocking out AMD/others from getting the benefits. The Batman Arkham Asylam scandal was one more people may recall. They claim (and their users/shills) that TWIMTBP is just "marketing"... more like bribery and blocking out the competition. They've been caught on many occasions but the public rarely sees anything negative about them.

Nvidia is the Intel/Microsoft of the video card industry but unlike them, isn't quite as dominant (thankfully for us) but they still do a hell of a lot of damage. (The Jupiter of the computer industry... too small to become a sun but still an 800 quadrillion ton gorilla).

I've stopped buying Nvidia cards since the Geforce 2. At that time for performance reasons but since then I vote with my wallet and let others know to support fair and legal competition.

Best example with the MMORPG UTOPIA

[SharpFang]

A friend told me about his experience with Utopia. It implemented GPU-accelerated physics in one of recent patches. But try hard as you wish, he failed to notice any difference for weeks of gameplay. Until he entered the central city. With flags by the entrance fluttering smoothly in the wind, instead of the old static animation.

Yep, that's it. Many megabytes of a patch, a game of hundreds of miles of terrain, hundreds of locations, battles, vehicles, all that stuff... and physics acceleration is used to flutter flags by the entrance.

In my experience, PhysX has only been a hindrance!

[Roger Wilcox]

I have to disable PhysX in the nVidia control panel to get HL2 or any of the Source engine games to run properly! I had no idea what was causing these games to crash. After disabling PhysX they work right every time!

Apparently it doesn't do anything crucial or even noticable as my games run just fine with it turned off. And now I'm told the game devs don't even want to use it?

This "feature" has caused me nothing but grief!