Radeon PhysX guy gets more help from NVIDIA

Posted on Tuesday, July 08 2008 @ 22:36 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Two weeks ago NGOHQ let us know they managed to get PhysX running on ATI Radeon HD graphics cards and today TG Daily has another update, the site says NGOHQ developer Eran Badit has been invited to join NVIDIA's developer program and has been offered hands-on help with his PhysX effort:
Eran Badit editor-in-chief of NGOHQ.com posted an update to the events of last week yesterday. He confirmed that he is receiving support from Nvidia to get PhysX to run on ATI cards. “It’s very impressive, inspiring and motivating to see Nvidia's view on this,” he wrote. He believes that Nvidia most likely wants to “take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel.”

He also noted that he made progress getting his hands on a Radeon 4800 card and noted that his CUDA Radeon library is “almost done.” Badit said that “there are some issues that need to be addressed, since adding Radeon support in CUDA isn’t a big deal - but it’s not enough! We also need to add CUDA support on AMD’s driver level and its being addressed as we speak.”

The tone at Nvidia has changed quite a bit over the past week. It appears that Nvidia does not mind running PhysX on ATI Radeon (or just about any other GPU) cards. In fact, Nvidia has opened access to Developer Relations and is providing assistance to Badit, including access to documentation, SDKs and more importantly, hardware and actual engineers. In the end, if Badit could get PhysX to run on Radeon cards, the PhysX reach would be extended dramatically and Nvidia would not be exposed to any fishy business claims – since a third party developer is leading the effort.

We contacted Nvidia for a statement and received the following note from Roy Taylor, vice president of developer relations:

"Eran and I have been talking via email and we have invited him to join NVIDIA’s registered developer program. We are delighted at his interest in CUDA and in GPU accelerated physics using PhysX. Eran joins a long line of developers who are now working on using the GPU to run physics and who are doing so with the world's leading physics software - PhysX. "
While NVIDIA seems very helpful we can't say the same of AMD. NGOHQ has still not received Radeon HD 4800 series hardware from AMD and they also write it took AMD seven days to send the documents they requested.


About the Author

Thomas De Maesschalck

Thomas has been messing with computer since early childhood and firmly believes the Internet is the best thing since sliced bread. Enjoys playing with new tech, is fascinated by science, and passionate about financial markets. When not behind a computer, he can be found with running shoes on or lifting heavy weights in the weight room.



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