Nvidia disables PhysX when ATI card is present

ghost_zero5 · August 1st, 2009, 10:40 AM

Hi,

today I got the same message as you regarding the development and research costs.
I gave them an answer with 4 points why that decision is wrong. I wonder if I will get an "interesting" answer but probably not.
However, now that I know this, I won't buy a nVidia card anymore. Actually, that arrogance was the main reason why I started to buy ATi cards. I had hoped they learnt a bit over the years but it seemed that I was wrong. Actually, it seems they have even gotten worse.

PhysX will never obtain victory that way. ATi for example is planning to use OpenCL for Havok and therefore it will work on any DirectX 11 card and that is actually the only possibility I see for PhysX to be competitive in the end. And this year there was also some news that they might port PhysX to OpenCL BUT after this I wonder if this will happen and even if the will definitely do something to make the performance of the OpenCL one worse than the other.
Furthermore, now ATi card user, can't even use a nVidia card as dedicated card anymore either. THAT makes it even worse for PhysX.

Regarding, inf file modding: Actually, I would have been surprised if that would have worked.

ghost_zero5 · August 1st, 2009, 01:35 PM

I wonder: Do they maybe check if the atikmdag is running?
If that's the case, modding the ATi driver to change the driver name might be the easier way to work around this "issue". However, they might also only check if the driver name a GPU has, is not their driver name and if that one is running. In that case just renaming it to e.g. btikmdag won't do the job either but it could be worth to try. However, even if that would work the question is how the CCC would react. It could be that it wouldn't find its own graphic cards anymore then.

darthcyclonis · August 1st, 2009, 06:28 PM

I think we need someone like Regen to modify these if possible. I'm not skilled enough to mess with things at driver level.

Arklon · August 1st, 2009, 09:29 PM

Well of course only nVidia would do something like this. Oh well, not my loss that they're deliberately sinking their PhysX.

Patrick_Wolf · August 1st, 2009, 10:33 PM

Is it still possible to use an ATI card + Ageia's obsolete PhysX add-in card together?

darthcyclonis · August 2nd, 2009, 03:05 AM

You can but the performance of the Ageia card is bad...Really showing it's age.

ghost_zero5 · August 2nd, 2009, 11:08 AM

Furthermore, if I am not mistaken the AEGIA card doesn't support all newer PhysX features anymore.

darthcyclonis · August 3rd, 2009, 07:08 PM

I'm not sure if it does? I have one kicking around. I just know it was not keeping up with even games like UT3 so i threw it into the parts box of no return.

ghost_zero5 · August 3rd, 2009, 09:42 PM

Well, of course, the performance would be pretty bad anyway. Starting from the point that it is a PCI card, it should at least have been a PCIe x1 card. Also because the PCI bus is sharing its bus (speed) over all "ports".

Btw. any news from nVidia or regarding a possible workaround? I tried the renaming the ATi driver/service name but it didn't really help and I am not sure if it worked perfectly anyway.

darthcyclonis · August 3rd, 2009, 10:27 PM

I had the Asus X1 version....A little better than the PCI but still not good.