NVidia Considering Porting PhysX To OpenCL 54
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.'"
Re:Competition is good.. for us (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Theory versus Practice (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Total hypocrits (Score:1, Insightful)
How about those fuckers at nvidia start by writing real open source drivers for their cards ?
xorg's nv is incredibly lame (doesn't even handle clock speed, because of "proprietary information"), and if you're not running one of those few systems that supports BINARY CLOSED SOURCE DRIVERS, you're totally out of luck.
First, they should play ball, then they can talk about writing standards.
Re:Competition is good.. for us (Score:4, Insightful)
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.