Rumour control: Nvidia helping driver modders with Radeon PhysX

Posted at: 3:11pm 4th July 2008 by Ben Hardwidge

Nvidia still happy for AMD to port PhysX over to Radeon cards using CUDA

Although Nvidia openly said it would talk to AMD about getting PhysX working on Radeon cards, we at least thought that it would charge the company to license the technology. However, the driver modders over at NGOHQ.com claim that Nvidia is actively helping them to get PhysX working on ATI GPUs, using the modded drivers they announced last week.

‘I’m going to ask you to hold on to something steady,’ says Regeneration in the latest post on the site, ‘as some of you are going to feel a bit dizzy after you hear this.’ He then announces that ‘Nvidia is now helping us with the project and it seems they are giving us their blessings.’ Why would Nvidia do that? Regeneration reckons that ‘they probably want to take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel,’ and he may well have a point.

We asked Nvidia’s product PR manager for Northern Europe, Ben Berraondo, if Nvidia was indeed helping NGOHQ with the project, and he said that he couldn’t confirm if that was the case at the moment. However, he added that ‘Nvidia do approve the use of CUDA for all these kinds of projects,’ and said that Nvidia would still be quite happy for AMD to port PhysX across using CUDA.

Interestingly, however, NGOHQ claims that AMD is ‘not being cooperative’ with the driver mod. ‘We get the feeling that they want this project to fail,’ says Regeneration. He then adds that he thinks AMD has plans ‘to strangle PhysX since AMD and Intel have Havok.’

Should AMD take up Nvidia on the offer of official PhysX support, or has it got the right idea by cooperating with Intel and Havok? Let us know your thoughts.