darthcyclonis

Well for all those who have have used Nvidia GeForce cards for PhysX and ATI Radeon cards to render graphics in Windows 7... All that is about to change.

Since the release of 186 graphics drivers Nvidia has decided to disable PhysX anytime a Non-Nvidia GPU is even present in the same PC. Nvidia again has shot themselves in the foot here and showed they are not customer oriented. Since they are pushing PhysX this will not win over any ATI fanboys with this latest decision.

Here is a copy of the email I received from Nvidia support confirming what they have done.

"Hello JC,

Ill explain why this function was disabled.

Physx is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs. I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused but I hope you can understand.

Best Regards,
Troy
NVIDIA Customer Care"

So this really confirms that PhysX will be doomed as an adopted API regardless how hard Nvidia pushes it as a result of action like this.

Updates:
• Patch Re-Enables PhysX When ATI Card is Present
• Nvidia Driver Bug Removes Hybrid PhysX Blockage
• Hybrid PhysX mod v1.01
• Hybrid PhysX mod v1.02
• Hybrid PhysX mod v1.03 / v1.04ff
• Hybrid PhysX mod v1.05ff

  

enzolt

you can probably just use old drivers. new driver revisions doesnt affect physx performance does it?

darthcyclonis

You are correct. As long as you use 185 and below you will be okay. You can still update the PhysX API drivers as long as your Nvidia drivers are 180.00 above. However from what I understand they are going to eventually require 186/190 and above for future PhysX API driver updates. Which means future game releases will not work with that type of setup.

enzolt

here's hoping DX11 will suffice

darthcyclonis

Either DX11, OpenCL or Havok it does not matter, PhysX is most likley going the way of the dinosaur with these other standards open to replace it.

Truthfully the whole part of running both GPU's by Nvidia and ATI in Win7 for PhysX was really experimental. I had installed the 190 drivers and had noticed PhysX missing from the 3d menu the Nvidia control panel. So I contacted Nvidia for the scoop.

What really pisses me off is their wonderfull statement about developmental costs and crap like that......Well I have news for them I bought my piece of shit 9800GTX+ (rebranded Nvidia GTS250)...So they got their god damn money. I realize they hate AMD but this is really only hurting consumers...in the end themselves

I wonder though...They crippled my cards ability because I run a competitors card in the same system...I know it's anti-competitive, but I wonder if it is against US laws???

enzolt

lol idk if it goes down that far. be careful of that slippery slope buddy

lumo

until windows 7 it was not even possible to put in 2 different graphics cards if i remember right (am i wrong? - pretty sure about xp not that sure about vista)

actually i never played a game which requires physix (well tried once mass effect, but i did not like it - it was more a playground for flying boxes than a game...)
COD4,5 FC2, Crysis, none of em requires a PhysiX card and those games are ok when it comes to physics. (and future titles will include physics too, and i doubt you HAVE to sitck to physix... probably ati comes with havoc any time 'soon' lol)

mkey

I bet you could find something about this matter in the books. It's like this

Imagine you bought a car. The car has a centralized cooling system. You payed extra dosh for that feature. Now, one day you go to the service and the guy says "OMG, I see that you have bought third party <insert whatever here>, a new rule has come into effect, I have orders to disable your cooling system until you amend the problem."

This is not possibly illegal, it's 100% illegal IMO. You payed for the device and you can do whatever you want with it. I would probably never get an Nvida card, but now I'm 100% sure of it. They can eat shit, as far as I'm concerned.

__________________
... what?

darthcyclonis

Lumo - You could run two different GPU's from different makers in XP. Microsoft changed that with WDDM 1.0 in Vista but brought the ability back in Windows 7 with WDDM 1.1 after a bunch of complaints.

Mkey - You are right...I was thinking down the same lines. I had not owned a Nvidia card since the 5 series which were junk. I see some things with Nvidia have not changed.

ghost_zero5

Yeah, I also think that this isn't legal either. It would be even worse if nVidia had a quasi-monopol like Microsoft does (well they don't but it still isn't legal).
Especially, since it worked before. The purposely removed a "feature" of it.

Anyway, is there no workaround for newer drivers because the last working driver (185.68) has extremely slow PhysX performance under Windows 7.
After all some of the NGOHQ.com-staff has been working to get PhysX to work on ATi cards too, so you should have the "highest" knowledge regarding this..?

I compared PhysX FluidMark results with 185.68 and the current Beta with the same resolution settings (1024x768) and everything set to run on my 9600GT Green Edition and with 185.68 - actually with that driver it doesn't really matter if I use the ATi as graphic card and 9600GT only as PhysX; I get more or less the same BAD results - I got a minimum FPS rate (once I reached the maximum particle count that was also the average FPS rate) of 17-18 FPS and with 190.38 Beta I got 43-44 FPS (however with e.g. 1920x1200 I also got only 17-18 FPS, I am mentioning this because I also did ATi graphic card and 9600GT tests under XP x64 with 185.68).

That is a huge a gap and of course decides if various games are playable or not (e.g. Sacred 2 with PhysX enabled isn't playable under Win7 with 185.68 because of the performance - it might not even work perfectly with the better performance but definitely better). Actually, the best results I got under XP x64 the last time I tried it with 185.68 because there I could use the ATi for graphics and the 9600GT was just PhysX that way I was able to achieve those 43-44 FPS minimum FPS rate EVEN at a resolution of 1920x1200

Anyway, because of this my DirectX11 card will definitely NOT be a nVidia graphic card which I had originally planned (mainly I intended to buy one because the Linux drivers are still a bit better but ATi is catching up and I could still use the 9600GT and switch between the ATi and that one as I do currently). This is just TOO customer unfriendly.
Not to mention that I also ask them regardging this "issue" - originally thinking that it was a mistake - and the answer was after a while more or less that this was "removed" intentionally AND that I should buy ANOTHER nVidia card if I want to use it.
Come on, why should I buy ANOTHER one of your cards after getting such poor customer support?

EDIT:
For those who are interested at what response I got after a while:
What they didn't seem to get is that the nVidia is the additional card, mainly because of Linux...