[citation][nom]dreamphantom_1977[/nom]I just have one question for ati- How come they didn't want physics?Nvidia is doing physic right- 1. anyone who played "cellfactor" knows that fluid and cloth simulations completely flunk on the cpu. GPU is the best way to run physics because it runs much much faster. 2. It's good they are pushing developers to implement physx- cuz physx means less scripting, which means doing the same thing in a game results in different results, wich means if you play the same game almost exactly the same, you may get different results, depending on different physical factors in the game, ie rain, traction, gravity, force, ect.. It makes the game more interesting, more real, and more playable. 3. Physics weren't taken seriously until nvidia came into the picture. Where was ati?I used to be a atifanboy- but about 8 years ago I switched, cuz I got sick of playing the numbers game, ati cards always have better specs, but they always give you less. Now it's nvidia for life for me. And I think it's funny that ati fans find it acceptable to let something slide as huge as physics. This is where nvidia shines, because nvidia is a company that stands by it's motto " the way it's meant to be played". Because real life has physics, and is in 3d, and nvidia built the first graphics cards, and was always first, nvidia knows what real gamers really want. This article shows ati = mad because no cash cow and they are trying to spoil nvidia's party. Boohoo ati....bad ati, bad..[/citation]Phantom, you're a bit off on your analysis, Havok pre-existed Ageia for a long time, but neither nvidia nor ATI implemented GPU physics at the time. It wasn't until a couple of years ago that this started to be what it is now. Before, companies would license a physics engine, or build their own. What happened was both nvidia and ATI found out that their processors could be used to calculate this stuff better than a cpu. Havok got bought up by Intel, and Ageia got bought up by nvidia. Ageia was a newcomer at the time, trying to push their physics API. Both of these were proprietary, but both companies were small. Had the situation ended well, both Ageia and Havok would have licensed their APIs to both ATI and nvidia, and it would simply be application controlled. A simple enable GPU physx/Havok physics would have done it. What has happened, is that Both of the biggest Physics APIs became proprietary in a different way. Physx has become exclusive to nvidia cards (minus a hack, but that's a different issue), and Havok still needs to be licensed, and since Larabee didn't happen, you don't see it implemented on Intel video cards, nor do you see it on other vendors cards. Rather than moving toward a more open solution, we've moved toward a closed one, one that excludes a large number of people for having bought a particular brand of GPU. This stuff isn't anti-competitve, but it seems like the actions of people who want control of the market in a kind of underhanded way. Both nvidia and ATI could implement Physx on their graphics cards, but having it owned by one of the two major GPU companies makes it a bit different to license. Now, ATI has to pay their competitor to implement it in the same way, when both are capable of running the API...Ownership of Ageia has changed it from something wonderfully cool, into something else, a leveraging agent in the marketplace...Being able to enable physics on the GPU isn't something exclusive to nvidia, they just bought a company with a large share of the market.
Ohim: I just jumped off the nvidia bandwagon over this stuff, it's changed from something cool into something ugly, sad thing.