Rumour control: PhysX hacked to run on ATI cards

Posted at: 3:57pm 27th June 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

NGOHQ.com claims to have hacked Nvidia’s PhysX driver to run on a Radeon HD 3850 card

Nvidia might think that it’s got control over hardware accelerated PhysX now that it’s bought Ageia, but the driver hackers over at NGOHQ.com claim to have hacked the CUDA code for PhysX to run it on a Radeon HD 3850 card.

We first saw a dubious-looking screenshot (see below) of the achievement on HardOCP yesterday, but decided that it was probably just a dodgy Photoshop hoax. However, the guy who posted the screenshot on NGOHQ now claims that he’s going to put up a video of the hack in action soon, and says that he may even make it available for Radeon owners to download in the future.

If the rumour is to be believed, then the hack makes a major difference to the Radeon HD 3850’s score in 3DMark Vantage with PhysX enabled. A screenshot of the 3DMark results shows the system scoring P4262. Although we don’t know what CPU was used in the test, the CPU score in the screenshot is 22,606, suggesting that the system is getting a major boost from PhysX being enabled. The GPU score of 3,354 in the screenshot is bang-on, as a Radeon HD 3850 score 3,349 in our tests at using the Performance preset in Issue 58.

The poster of the hack at NGOHQ.com, Regeneration, promises that we can ‘expect to see some cool demo video in several days-weeks,’ but also says that ‘it takes a lot of time and work to make CUDA compatible enough with Radeon to get it to fully work without any issues.’

We’re not entirely sure if this is legitimate yet, and the fact that it says ‘Ho ho ho’ in the screenshot’s address bar isn’t particularly reassuring either. That said, if this turns out to be real then it would be an interesting development for the GPU industry, showing that CUDA-compatibility is more about industry competition than hardware requirements.

Either way, it brings up some interesting questions about GPU physics and how far people may be allowed to take driver modding in the future. Is this a hack or a hoax? We won’t know until NGOHQ releases its hack to download (or not).