AndrewJacksonZA :
"If you use an Nvidia GPU, there are exclusive graphics improvements, as well."
Hmmm... I don't like this: developers catering to an exclusive vendor. What will we get down the road? More and more and more features exclusive to graphics vendor X?
Poor form guys. I don't want to see the PC market going down the toilet.
This has been an issue for quite a while. Probably before PhysX.
AMD is trying to go more open with their approach. I respect that, though the primary motivations are probably more about financially not being able to do what NVidia is doing.
I have an NVidia card and will buy one next, in part due to these features. I don't like it, but that's the state of things and I'm not going to go with an arguably degraded experience just to vote my opinion on the matter.
I'm not clear how or if this matter can be resolved either. I guess we really need the open source community to offer something comparable. I doubt developers are completely happy with the situation either. Sure, they may get some tools that potentially make their lives easier, but then they still have to create something nice for AMD cards.
I half expect the EU to jump in and say "no, no you can't sell games with proprietary stuff in Europe.. fix or be sued!"
Dev tools like Unreal 4 Engine are also adding in great plugins. I believe Microsoft bought Havok so perhaps we'll see a viable solution to replace PhysX completely but these things take YEARS to develop.
(to make things worse we have SteamOS which I love the concept of, but now we've got a Linux environment, non-DX API. I feel sorry for game developers and AMD. If NVidia offers a version of Gameworks for Linux that helps game devs that could be problematic for AMD in addition to their Linux driver difficulties.)