NVIDIA Removes Restriction on ATI GPUs with NVIDIA GPUs Processing PhysX

[BenchZowner]

Only way to correct their mistake is to keep "Hybrid PhysX" enabled ( not blocked ) in all their betas... can't wait to see that happening

[BeepBeep2]

Their beta drivers for the most part are stable so a big thunbs up to them.

[knopflerbruce]

If nvidia keep on treating their customers like crap, at some point even the fanboys will stop buying their gear. And without fanboys, nvidia are nothing.

[Svnth]

If nvidia keep on treating their customers like crap, at some point even the fanboys will stop buying their gear. And without fanboys, nvidia are nothing.

Sounds scientific to me. I'm sure you've already done all the math and research.

[zanzabar]

Only way to correct their mistake is to keep "Hybrid PhysX" enabled ( not blocked ) in all their betas... can't wait to see that happening

that seams like a good compromise as long as betas are public, that way they dont have to support ati but they are still just having cuda work as its intended to.

[Solus Corvus]

that seams like a good compromise as long as betas are public, that way they dont have to support ati but they are still just having cuda work as its intended to.

They never had to support the ATI + Nvidia combination in the first place, even when they had it blocked. They don't test every driver they release with every possible Nvidia + MB/Processor/SoundCard/PS/Monitor/etc combination - not to mention every possible driver combination for the other hardware.

They don't even have to guarantee it works with the hardware/software combination that they actually do test it with. The, fairly standard, EULA says as much.

From the beta:

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, NONINFRINGEMENT, OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. NVIDIA does not warrant or assume responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of any information, text, graphics, links or other items contained within the Software. NVIDIA does not represent that errors or other defects will be identified or corrected.

From a recent WHQL:

6.1 No Warranties. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND NVIDIA AND ITS SUPPLIERS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

[zanzabar]

phsyX back with agea was advertised with ati cards, then NV made the buyout and they still did not say no ati, then it was blocked. clearly customers want phsyX and ati to get along and clearly NV thinks of phsyX as a marketing tool. so i dont see why NV would go an actively block it when it will just get cracked to work but i also see that they dont want the general public to use phsyX with ati card doing rendering so by putting that only for the betas they could stop the general public from thinking that it will work (not that the general public who most computers dont even have a mid range card or care.) i honestly dont see any1 buying a card based on if phsyX will work with it but it will clear their stock of low end cards that no1 wants to buy for retail in the $50-100 range.

but NV said that they cannot make sure that the drivers will work with ati so if thats the case then for the beta that have no support they should support letting other people have rendering cards when phsyX is working on a co-processor.


i saw a 240gts at frys for $50 affter rebate and i had though maybe it would be worth it for physX since batman AA 2 was coming out this year but then i thought about it and remembered that phsyX is a marketing tool so why bother with it

[BeepBeep2]

If nvidia keep on treating their customers like crap, at some point even the fanboys will stop buying their gear. And without fanboys, nvidia are nothing.

You know, before Phenom II came you could say the same thing about AMD...

*hides*

[ryan92084]

untill we get an open source (or at least multi platform) ppu going on i don't even care anymore

[Mungri]

i saw a 240gts at frys for $50 affter rebate and i had though maybe it would be worth it for physX since batman AA 2 was coming out this year but then i thought about it and remembered that phsyX is a marketing tool so why bother with it

Yea, Nvidia have waited too long for doing this.

12 months ago I would have bought an Nvidia card for Physx, but now I just looked through the list of Physx games, and I cant see any reason at all to spend £70 on a 9800 GT for such a small number of games.

Bring back the 9600 GSO, or any 96 shader card for <£50, and maybe then I'll reconsider it.

I'll hunt around for a cheap GTX 240.

Those are all double slots though, cant find a better priced single slot card that the 9800 GT for £70

[zanzabar]

the 240 is a tiny single slot its the size of a classic midrange card or a good sound card, a bunch of stores are way over stocked as they had to take them to get higher end cards

[Sailindawg]

Silly NV! I was loyal since the GeForce2 - 8800gtx. Now...well I can do without.

lol.....I ran nvidia straight through since the Ti4200. The 4200 was the first vid card that I ever overclocked. I still have it in my wife's pc. Now I'm running a 5870 that clocks well, runs cooler and quieter as compared to the GTX 4xx. As far as PhysX is concerned, I'm not sure that any of the games that I have utilize outside of GRAW, which I have not played in ages. I have a 8800GT laying around that I would use for PhysX, but too bad for nvidia that they want to play games with PhysX.

Thanks BenchZowner for the driver download.

[FischOderAal]

Only way to correct their mistake is to keep "Hybrid PhysX" enabled ( not blocked ) in all their betas... can't wait to see that happening

That would be a good compromise imho. I'd buy a card for PhysX as soon as NVIDIA makes it clear it's keeping it activated in Beta-drivers.

Right now I'm still a bit wary. The way I understand it they keep it activated in the current Beta and will remove it in the WHQL as well as upcoming Betas.

Or did I misunderstand something?

[STEvil]

edit - nevermind

[BenchZowner]

That would be a good compromise imho. I'd buy a card for PhysX as soon as NVIDIA makes it clear it's keeping it activated in Beta-drivers.

Right now I'm still a bit wary. The way I understand it they keep it activated in the current Beta and will remove it in the WHQL as well as upcoming Betas.

Or did I misunderstand something?

That's how I understood nVIDIA's "statement".
They'll leave it as is for this beta version, but they'll block it in future WHQL's and beta's.

[FischOderAal]

Maybe I should trust your view on this. English isn't my mother tongue.

[Final8ty]

Update: NVIDIA tells us that they will also be "fixing" the 257.15 beta driver on their site, so new downloads of that driver will have the restriction in place

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3744/n...-not-a-feature

[Chumbucket843]

^^ apparently not.
http://blogs.nvidia.com/ntersect/201...support-1.html
i feel like a jerk for quoting the whole blog but whatever.

A lot of you have been asking about PhysX and the 257.15 beta driver we posted on Monday. First off it is true that PhysX is enabled when running on NVIDIA GPUs when AMD GPUs are used in the same system. PhysX is a compelling technology that makes PC games great – I am not surprised our fans are eager for it. When using this beta driver no additional hacks are required to enable PhysX. While it was not intentional, due to the overwhelming positive response to the beta driver we have decided to leave the beta up with support enabled.

The fact remains that the investment to do a full QA cycle on this AMD/NVIDIA hybrid GPU configuration is beyond what NVIDIA can support at this time. The cost of maintaining AMD/NVIDIA hybrid configurations is larger than the development expense for PhysX, and I do expect that there are games and configurations where this type of system just won’t work. Please, don’t call me :>. Therefore our WHQL certified drivers will continue to have this support disabled.

it seems that nvidia is in a quagmire with this whole thing. but it think it would be easier to just let it run on ATi hardware under the table rather than explicitly prevent physx from running on a system with ATi hardware.

[BeepBeep2]

Well, the ntersect blog makes sense.

Nvidia hasn't been very well off financially lately with AMD's 4800 and 5800 series storm...and they are only giving the PhysX team so much money.
They would have to test every AMD GPU from HD3000 to HD5970 with every nvidia GPU from 8500GT to 480GTX to ensure complete compatibility. That's alot of time, and alot of money.

From the way that blog post is worded, it seems that they are being generous with beta's from now on and letting AMD+Nvidia GPU's to work together and do PhysX. Just WHQL drivers will have it removed do to their lack of R&D.

[Carfax]

From the way that blog post is worded, it seems that they are being generous with beta's from now on and letting AMD+Nvidia GPU's to work together and do PhysX. Just WHQL drivers will have it removed do to their lack of R&D.

That will be the best way to go about it imo..

While some people on this forum condemn PhysX with every breath, there are A LOT of ATI users that want the capability of using PhysX in their system along side their ATI cards; otherwise there wouldn't be so much consternation.

Most of us here on Xtremesystems have expensive rigs that we spend lots of money on for everything from gaming to folding to encoding etc.. While I've always preferred Nvidia, I can imagine that if I were an ATI user, I would naturally want the ability to run PhysX, simply because it encompasses another element of gaming that increases quality and immersion; not unlike more detailed textures and other PC specific tweaks that developers like to include in PC games.

To spend thousands of dollars on a rig, yet be purposely barred from PhysX capability would annoy the pi$$ out of me.

[Final8ty]

A lot of you have been asking about PhysX and the 257.15 beta driver we posted on Monday. First off it is true that PhysX is enabled when running on NVIDIA GPUs when AMD GPUs are used in the same system. PhysX is a compelling technology that makes PC games great – I am not surprised our fans are eager for it. When using this beta driver no additional hacks are required to enable PhysX. While it was not intentional, due to the overwhelming positive response to the beta driver we have decided to leave the beta up with support enabled.

The fact remains that the investment to do a full QA cycle on this AMD/NVIDIA hybrid GPU configuration is beyond what NVIDIA can support at this time. The cost of maintaining AMD/NVIDIA hybrid configurations is larger than the development expense for PhysX, and I do expect that there are games and configurations where this type of system just won’t work. Please, don’t call me :>. Therefore our WHQL certified drivers will continue to have this support disabled.

I wish NV had the stones to just say that they just don't want people to have ATI cards & NV cards together than to come out with such rubbish.

There is no more interaction between the cards with PhysX than with CUDA & folding at home running on the NV card & the ATI card doing the display but NV don't try that excuse with those because the target audience are a bit more clued up at the coding level & how things communicate than the avg joe gamer, the fact is that the PPU card had no issues with any GPU.

[annihilat0r]

I am not reading what you guys are from that statement. I understand that the guy said "whql certified drivers won't allow physx on ati" and you read it as "from now on all beta drivers will allow physx", but the way I am looking at it, it sounds more like he was referring specifically to the WHQL version of the 257.15 driver ONLY. So it's like, OK we let you guys have the 257.15 with ATI Physx, but its WHQL version won't allow it. And I don't see them allowing physx with beta drivers any more.

[Final8ty]

I am not reading what you guys are from that statement. I understand that the guy said "whql certified drivers won't allow physx on ati" and you read it as "from now on all beta drivers will allow physx", but the way I am looking at it, it sounds more like he was referring specifically to the WHQL version of the 257.15 driver ONLY. So it's like, OK we let you guys have the 257.15 with ATI Physx, but its WHQL version won't allow it. And I don't see them allowing physx with beta drivers any more.

That beta driver has already been replace with a 257.15 blocked version.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/...&postcount=117

[zanzabar]

I am not reading what you guys are from that statement. I understand that the guy said "whql certified drivers won't allow physx on ati" and you read it as "from now on all beta drivers will allow physx", but the way I am looking at it, it sounds more like he was referring specifically to the WHQL version of the 257.15 driver ONLY. So it's like, OK we let you guys have the 257.15 with ATI Physx, but its WHQL version won't allow it. And I don't see them allowing physx with beta drivers any more.

thats what i was getting but i cant see NV leaving the market out from non NV rendering cards as they have a huge amount of retailers and etailer that are mad about the stockpile of low end cards that no1 wants and they were forced to buy and i can see them having a list of what can and cannot be used with ati or a shader cap latter (like how it is when a card is rendering and doing phsyX) so it lets them sell cards to ati users but still use phsyX as a marketing tool. it would also drive up the price of the low end cheap to make cards so that might be more profitable as the g200 is EOL and the 4xx is low production and everything else is unwanted they dont have a choice.

[STEvil]

There are different sources saying both things: Betas will continue to be blocked and betas will now be unblocked...

We can only wait for the next couple sets of drivers to tell which is true.