I guessed the politics would pan out sort of like this...well support is support regardless of which camp it comes from ... hope things continue to go well with your project...no pressure but the eyes of the world are on you.

Regen

Thank you for the update I was starting to become skeptic about the release because of the Hd 4800 issue Thank you for reassuring me, and many others that everything is on track.

word,, this is great news hope i get in on the beta,, my 3870x2 is ready to go and so am i

Ninjaboy

OMGHAX.

Nice, I'll be watching out for this. Interesting responses from the companies as well!

wow, thats the most shocking news i have read in teh last few days. i guess nvidia is desperate to make cuda a success . hats off to them .


i too was skeptic if this project would ever be released.

I would not have guessed that nVidia would step up to the plate to help you but now that they have it does make a kind of logic. They simply want their physics implementation to become widely accepted. With that as a goal providing support to third-parties to facilitate that becomes a lot more reasonable.

5 spies? 007 wouldnt be one of them? :P

But seriously Nvidia embracing this was quite a supprise.

I KNEW nvidia would support this, they would never miss the opertunity to get their physx api on ATI cards long before ATI has havok ready to go, they would be seriously stupid to pass up an opertunity like this.

Out of curiosity, how do you know who is a spy or a double agent?

That is awesome Regen, keep up the hard work..........hmm....Me thinks Nvidia may clip havoks wings before it can fly?

well it is a surprising event . I never would have guessed that Nvidia would remotly help out . So a good cheers goes out to Regen For his tireless efforts and also to nvidia .

Wow! I wish the moment comes when my pair of 3850 accelerate both PhysX (thanx to You, Rege) & Havok (officially)! So We'll be able to choose in which mode to play games )) Then Radeons will become the most universal cards to use... Maybe )))
Anyways - I'm ready to help testing beta in both modes - crossfire & separate.
If all that worx I'll switch to AMD790FX or Intel X48 (X58) to be able to have two my overclocked 3850 cards in crossfire rendering + one 3870 card on PhysX acceleraton.
... Nice dreams by me

Great news, I only have a single HD3870 but I’m itching to give your driver a whirl.

Surprisingly, the idea of adding PhysX capabilities to my HD3870 has to some extent diminished my overall disappointment with this card & its usability with AMD’s current drivers.

Who knows, AMD’s lack of assistance may actually be a blessing in disguise, I wouldn’t be surprised if your project succeeds in adding PhysX, performance & stability. From my perspective you certainly couldn’t do any worse than AMD.

Regards, Kelli

Where it is possible to download physx for radeon3870?

lol...nvidia....Good to hear that...hope they can help u with ur codings...

i never see havok performed ... will it better ?
long time ago nvidia also with havok..

Wow, impressive. I was thinking both companies might not help at all due to the possible double-edged sword of this "test". Good luck.

ok . this show a good side of the company once again

but do i smell the option that nivida whas Extra people for the PhysX team ?:P

could be other wise.. !!

ill hope people working on this "hack" as i prefer to call it can work for Nvidia

Whould be freeking awesome!!!

just like the guys Who made Desertcombat for Bf1942 Thaks to that whe have. Battfield 2 / Badcompany!

What will this Bring out in the near future :O?!!

Gonne keep this close Good luck all with the 4800 samples'!

keep on going guys. if you will do it i am sure ngohq will move into the radeon heaven like the 9800 pro :-)

I found this site just 2 weeks ago while reading up on the 4800 series cards. I knew about physx and how nvidia had bought them and was going to implement it on their cards and really felt a little left out as I have a 3870. But after reading about all this, I am excited to try all this out. Thanks for all your hard work on this project and I look forward to giving this go.

Also, great site by the way. I visit here often now. Wish I had knew about it long ago. Thanks again.

Just wanted to say thanks for all your hard work on this project. Looking forward to giving this a go.
Discovered this site 2 weeks ago reading up on the 4800 series from amd and the work you are doing on this project. I like amd/ati and have been a loyal user since my 9700pro ( which I am still using in an older computer ) but felt a little left out in the cold with nvidia buying physx and enabling it on their cards. But after reading about your work here, I got all excited again. Great work and thank you again.

Nice Eran , good to see You still have it , About nVidia , nice to see that , but its in ther bissnes so no suprice here. Anyway , we users can only benefit from that

well it's too bad AMD has not cotacted you yet with support. It's no surprise though. And Cudo's to Nvidia! They have not always been supportive when it comes to open or modified drivers/code in the past but I think with Intel and AMD in bed together with Havok they really did not have a choice. Let's just hope AMD does not get a hair across their butts and lock out physix/cuda with a bios or driver update.

I up the big 4 realize that a unified physics platform is the only real viable option for consumers. But the longer they fight the less chance that game developers will implement either one.

Sent in my app to the BETA test program! Really excited at the prospect of testing this and other cool lil proggies and being able to give feedback and pitch in!

A few posts back it was asked how you guys know who's a spy and whos a double agent.... +1 to that! How do you know? lol

Does that make me a spy? I been lurking in various forums but never sign up to them.... MSI and most recently this one are the exception lol

Am i the only one not suprised by any of this? Of course nvidia will help, they want their api on the competitions cards before the competition has their api read, your handing them the market on a silver plater, and of course amd is gonna ignore you or even fight you, they dont want their competitors api working on their cards when their havok api isnt even ready, all of this is just business

Why don`t you try making Havok running on Geforce, and see how cooperative Nvidia will be.

lets not play one company after another, what these guys are doing is great and if it works , it seems we might have a choice of either using havok, or Physx on ati. So lets just show some support for the little guys here.

"To be specific: 191 users, 5 spies and 2 double agents"
NOW this u have to start a thread on! Inquiring minds want to know! ROTFLMFAO!!!!!!!!!

it's more than obvious that nvidia will help, if they get CUDA work at ATI cards they get one step closer to cuda reach the standard status. On the other hand if ATI help you guys I'm sure the lawyers from Nvidia are waiting for an opportunity like that to sue them up...

Do I understand it correctly when I say that you're going for full cuda support on ati? So regardless of it being physx or some other application that uses cuda to do certain stuff...You're planning to mke it work on ati cards?

That would be awesome! There are already apps popping up using cuda to speed things up like video encoding and what not. To be able to use this on both brands would give you lots of freedom.

imm sure that if he had the sdk for havok he would try it as well but have you seen any signs of havok api anywhere??? maybe thats why he tried this in the first place?

couldn't agree more , maybe when Havok is here it can be attempted , but for the time being Physx is all we got....... but that in itself is a good point !! ATI is all uncooperative about this but seriously Where Is Havok?? i think nv won the race and deserve the kudo's for it , slap a sticker on it and make it the standard for physics.... Intel just wants to keep it's share of the market and ATI sold it's soul to the devil....oh wait, or is it nv that's the devil??.....never quite sure?????? Lol......

I am happy to see all the companies at war once more. I just wish that the X2's would arrive soon, never mind about all this physics stuff. I wonder if you had the Ageia PhysX card in with a 4800 series card, will they work together or even at all? Hmmm. Must try this when I get my hands on a 48xx card.

Well I've got an ageia PPU physx card in my system with an ATI 3870X2 using catalyst 8.6 graphic driver and nvidia's physx driver...works fine....they are independant of each other....Actually the PHYsx driver I'm using is Nvidias latest one that supports both the ageia card and Geforce graphics cards as physx accelerators....sort of makes me wonder if it would be possible to put a Nvidia graphics card in as a dedicated physx card to work along side ATI cards that are doing the graphics?

Would be interested in Regen's view on this.

like a cheap little 8600 when the drivers support it?

Yeah...Precisely.

thought bout' that one meself......

I have a 4870. I can not wait to test this wrapper.

I care it much. mostly on when it will be given out for using

I was wondering the same thing as Xerock.
Is this complete CUDA-to-ATI project, or just Physx-2-ATI? And although I'm excited even about just having Physx on 4xxx series Radeons, having complete CUDA compatibility would be AWSOME!

Keep up the good work, now I have no more doubts about buying HD48xx (instead of 9800GTX(+) )

P.S. Say hi to Theo for me ;D

CUDA itself it only optimized code input by developers in C ot utilize the GPU instead of the CPU

But if the drivers can't recognize that code then theres no effect

so in short yes(kinda),

Huxtable? :-D

It would be nice to have a single physix interface that ran on both ATI and Nvidia regardless of cpu or os. maybe throw in apple and linux.



i personally think it would be great to have a hybrid SLI-XFire system with multiple physix GPU`s. After yhe politicos wake up and see that any video device can work regardless of chipset and the extra revenue it would bring in then they would ( or I say should) be more recptive to inovations that make since as well as money. I think it is about time we start offering linux as a game option install as well as other apps. this is just the tip of the iceberg in my opinion.

I want to sign up for beta tester too please - A single HIS HD 3870 512 DDR4 and a ageia/nvidea physix card, bigfoot killer nic too.

You have done an outstanding job! keep up the good work.
ironleg

อ่านไม่ออก

I have a novel idea for you guys in your quest to get PhysX running on ATI 4000 series cards: BUY THE DAMN CARD!

I'm sorry, but you guys are kinda wrong here. OF COURSE ATI won't send you a FREE CARD so that you can get their competitors technology to run on it. First of all, ATI has a business to run. I don't care who you are, what country you're from, etc... if you own a business and you are developing a product, and some guy asks you to send him your flagship card for free so he can make your competitors technology work on it... would you do it? If you said yes, you're business won't make it.

This about it this way. The card costs you, what, $500 MAX? Well AMD/ATI has no-doubt already thrown MILLIONS into their physics technology that isn't even ready yet. Do you think AMD/ATI will just give you that card so you can potentially ruin the millions and millions of dollars they've spent by making a competitors technology work first? Maybe even work better? No, they would be stupid. In fact, I can't even contemplate why you feel they're "not supporting" the site. Its not that they aren't supporting this site, its that this site is potentially damaging AMD/ATI technology.

Why don't you guys get some common sense and stop complaining about EVERYTHING! I'm sick of how what used to be MY FAVORITE SITE (yes, this one) now annoys me cause all I get to read anymore is bickering, complaining, and political BS.

Rege's little project could have gotten bigger wheels turning..

http://www.techpowerup.com/64933/Phy...we_Missed.html

If this goes ahead and we get official support it could be a good time to be an ATI card owner.

phx31: AMD should be happy they get huge marketing plus out of this if it works they can easily claim "Our hardware supports all major physics engines on market so pick Your game and enjoy ONLY on AMD.ATI!'
if You can't see it then go and enjoy 'PR talk' support la Havok atm

I don't disagree with your mission, but thinking your going to get corporate backing of a mission to support competitors technology is insane. That would be like asking Microsoft to give you a free copy of Vista Ultimate so you can hack it to run a ported KDE or gnome instead of Explorer.exe and its native GUI.

I think its awesome what this site is trying to accomplish. I hope you are able to get this working on ATI products, as I typically still prefer the ATI brand over nvidia, and this would be an awesome physX support "patch". I think its cool how many people signed up to beta test this, and I wish you all good luck.

Here are some answers to your questions:

Q: Is this complete CUDA-to-ATI project, or just Physx-2-ATI?
A: CUDA-to-ATI project and PhysX.

Q: How come you have screenshots and its taking you so much to finish the project?
A: There is a lot of difference between partial support and full support. We don’t want to release incomplete project with a lot of bugs. We want to finish our project and to offer full support for PhysX and CUDA.

Q: Stop whining! Buy the damn card.
A: Budget/money is not an issue here. The issue here is the lack of world-wide availability of the HD 4800 series. We started this project a few days after AMD launched their HD 4800 series. We can’t acquire cards from AMD because they refuse to sell in low volumes and it’s unavailable via shops in our region (Forget about eBay! my eBay account is banned for no reason and they refuse to tell me why). So our only chance is either waiting for shops or asking from AMD. We don’t like to wait, it slows us down. If you can get AMD/their partners to sell in low volumes, we would love buy that damn card.

Q: It’s not that they aren't supporting this site; it’s that this site is potentially damaging AMD/ATI technology.
A: We emailed AMD before they launched the new HD 4800 family and asked to borrow samples. They ignored our emails and that was before we even thought about this project.

Q: Stop complaining about everything
A: It’s our obligation to report everything to our users/readers.

Q: To get corporate backing of a mission to support competitor’s technology is insane
A: This technology could make their Radeon brand even more attractive. Nvidia will use their popular The Way It Meant to be Played program to promote PhysX and everyone knows that Nvidia has better relations with game developers then AMD. If Radeons would support both PhysX and Havok it should make the brand more attractive to consumers.

Q: AMD/ATI has no-doubt already thrown millions into their physics technology
A: AMD received Havok license for free.

Q: Why don`t you try making Havok running on GeForce, and see how cooperative Nvidia will be.
A: It’s being investigated for some time now.

Q: Would it be possible to put an Nvidia graphics card in as a dedicated PhysX card to work alongside ATI cards that are doing the graphics?
A: No. But I think its possible with some software modifications.

Glad that you're working on this, will be keeping my eye out.

And you're 100% correct that this being out could help ATI sales because I for one am a bit weary of jumping over to ATI cards at the moment as several games I play, and I'm sure more coming out soon, are using PhysX and not Havok for physics simulation. It's a great position to be in in the market when you're product can be called the safe choice while a format war takes place. I can see a lot of people looking at it as better go ATI and not have to worry about what the developer chose as opposed to going Nvidia and potentially losing out on the GPU accelerated physics for 50% of games.

Please Count me in ....

My information over here... 3dnow.net forum (not da or spy ,just "3dnow" fans from the old days)

Thanks Rege for addressing some of my comments. I appreciate you being open and honest.

Q: "It’s our obligation to report everything to our users/readers."
A: I agree. I like when information is reported. Its just that the tone can change the meaning.
"ATI still has not sent us a card for us to use" would be reporting.
"I think ATI must want us to fail as they refuse to acknowledge our project" is whining.

Q: "This technology could make their Radeon brand even more attractive. . . If Radeons would support both PhysX and Havok it should make the brand more attractive to consumers."
A: Yes, I agree with you again. This technology is AWESOME. However, I still don't think you are willing to see their side of the argument. Your project is something that ATI cannot support, regardless of whether or not they want to. Business just doesn't work this way unfortunately.

Q: AMD received Havok license for free.
A: True. The license is free. Implementing that technology in their hardware, in a consistent, reliable manner takes time. Of all people, you should know this. Time is money, and money is hard to come by. Regardless of how little they paid for the technology, the implementation is where the money is burned.

"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. "

Do you still want to release the drivers now that your in Nvidia's Dev Program

In other news, NGOHQ partners with developers from Falling Leaf Systems, to co-develop the physx port.

I have a HD4850 and i would be glad to beta test it were to apply ?
i really hope your efforts succeed!! really amazing stuff and brain you have there.
congratz Eran

Just think of Intel + Havok. Do you think they would like to see ATI + PhysX? Maybe they simply don't allow it....

hope that was ironical comment about FLS
tho i heard some russians continue the DX10 @ XP with success to some degree ...

can i be part of the beta tester of this driver? pls, thanks

Oh, for f*ck sake, can't you spare 200$ and get radeon 4850 ? here is the link:
http://computers.pricegrabber.com/vi.../sortby=priceA
and, Teo Valich is an idiot.
Cheers!

I wonder if you can add support for the intergrated gpu of the 780g chipset. The Radeon HD 3200 is pretty much a cut down version of the 3800 right?

Do you really think that we can’t spare $200 bucks? Think again - as these shops aren’t shipping to Israel. eBay could have been a good source, too bad the abusive staff members there banned my account for no reason back in 2006. Anyways, my favorite shop called today and said they may have some HD 4800 boards in stock during this week.

I for one, fully support this project. I have been looking at the latest batch of radeon boards (4800 series) and debating between upgrading to Nvidia or ATI/AMD. The one thing that has been holding me back is the lack of PhysX support. CUDA still seems like it is realistically a few years out before it becomes "usable" with current OSs and everyday software/gaming so it isn't an immediate issue. However, there are games out there currently using the PhysX API and for ATI/AMD cards to support this feature (plus the recent price/performance reviews of the latest chipsets) would make ATI/AMD the ideal solution (esp. with guaranteed CUDA support down the road).

now since he is part of nvidia team , does this mean he cant continue his work ? bc offically ati and nvidia cant support this not directly anyways ( indirect they can do what they want ) reason y is bc nvidia cant make a offical nvidia software work on ati cards without proper authorization from ati and same goes for ati cant make the software compatable to there own cards with out proper authorization from nvidia . its an old fashioned catch 22 . another question if by chance Ati does allow Physics to work on ati cards and nvidia's ageia physics program becomes dominate , will nvidia still support physics on ati cards ? or is it a bunch of smoke and mirrors allowing the few ati users to get a glimpse of how physics supposed to run and then all of sudden stop supporting physics on other manufacturers stuff ?

seems these may help (sponsor you)
http://www.skypc.co.il/search.asp?qs...4870&qmanufact=

Can someone PLEASE explain to me how it's possible to run PhysX on an ati radeon? I thought that PhysX technology was an actual physical piece of hardware on the graphic card. If Nvidia now owns this technology than how can ATI have it on their cards??? PLEASE ANSWER!

The Unified shader on the GPU's are able to accelerate the physx calculations. This will be realised by the CDUA software interface. The Nvidia Physx driver now converts the physx commands to CDUA commands the GPU can understand. Nvidia Physx driver is only able to convert the physx commands to its own Nvida driver. So the ATI driver has to be modded to react on the commands that it gets from the Nvidia physx driver. This is how I had understand the relationship between the NV physx and Nvidia / ATI drivers.

i think you mean CUDA software interface right? And if what you are saying is true then why couldn't we have Physx on ANY videocard ever made? You would just need a custom driver right?

because its owned by one company and we are tring to get it to work on someone elses hardware . its not a matter of driver tweaking to get it to work ( as i understand it myself both nvidia and ati handle the math calculations almost the same its just the way each company goes bout it is different . ) nvidia cant just release a driver for Ati as the same goes Ati cant release a driver for ageia to run on Ati cards bc nvidia owns ageia . both companies have to have agreements and signed documents and the likes so it makes it legal to do that ( this way Ati cant sue nVidia or nVidia sue Ati ) personally i feel all three companies should agree to do something and work together on the physics ( Intel ( havok ), Ati , nVidia ( Ageia ) ) to work on all platforms this way it elimantes the Bs of , the only way u can have physics is by Nvidia hardware , or ati hardware or intel hardware .

well nvidia could eventually drop support for software only physx, and enable games to make better use of GPU's in general.

i just hope Ati follows up on Nvidia, and get AMD to support it also.

Regeneration -> Are you implementing the CUDA support by translating to CAL/Brook+ or something along those lines? Also is it too late to join in with the begging to be part of the beta? This Aussie over here wants to have a play with his 3870 ;-) Cheers Mate

I hear ya there i got 3 perfectly good 3870 cores waiting to be physic tested ( 3870 x2 and a 3870 )

Some news from the front:

Supported:
Radeon HD 3x00 Series
Radeon HD 2x00 Series

Unsupported:
Radeon HD 4x00 Series
CrossFire and CrossFireX (Runs in Single GPU mode)

Unknown:
Radeon HD 3870 X2
Radeon HD 3850 X2
Radeon X1000 Series and below

hmm... havent release?... can send it to me coz i'm using 3850 normal 1..

eh. wouldn't be be the first piece of software i had ta fight with .....won't be my last....

2x 3870
x1950pro

LOL no, very similar to 3400, it it was cut down version of 3800 it would be awesome.

Is it ready!!!???
Would a HD3650 be ok for PhysX ?

I wonder if physx calcs could be run on the integrated graphics, while the discrete graphics runs games at full speed. Of course, bad integrated graphics wouldn't run well (not better than CPU), but maybe something like the upcoming 790GX could do it.

do you need a 3870x2 to test it on Regen?

GPU Physics isn't cuda, since CUDA operations require the GPU to be used in modes, which can't be switched on and off instantly.

GPU Physics itself makes use of the driver itself to hand out jobs to clusters of shaders.

I can finally get my 2900XT out of my closet, it will be great to see how this runs on the HD2900XT vs the HD3870

GUYS GUYS GUYS!!!! I'm NOT talking about the LEGALITY of such matters! I'm asking about the technical aspects. Again, if Physx isn't hardware based then in theory couldn't it be run on ANY videocard?

both the display driver, and the physics driver, must support card in use, the physics driver tells the display driver that a game supports physics, so the driver specifies a number of shader processors to be used for physics.

I think this project would be a lot simpler and provide a better end product if they just tried to get physx working on a dedicated card along side the graphics setup rather than trying to get both physx and graphics to work on the same card.

let me explain...Ive seen some recent benchmarks (damned if I can find them now) comparing GPU, PPU and CPU physx... while GPU physx was much faster than on the CPU the FPS showed a considerable drop when compared to the dedicated PPU and the drop using GPU physx became considerably larger at higher resolutions when it it was only equal to CPU physx (obviously at the higher res the graphics card had enough to do without the added physx).

At the moment I'm quite happily running an Ageia PPU card using Nvidia's Physx driver which supports both Ageia PPU and Geforce graphics cards to do physx along side my my ATI 3870X2 graphics card running catalyst 8.6 graphics driver....see where I'm going?

Wouldn't it be easier to alter this driver to support Ageia PPU, Nvidia Geforce cards and ATI cards to do physx separately and distinclty from the graphics set up and ultimately this would give a more powerful setup and could be used alongside either an Nvidia or ATi graphics setup. As some commentators have also said it would be quite interesting if suitable integrated graphics could be dedicated to do the physx operations.

I think that is an arguement best left to the manufacturers, but riddle me this Batman ......how much did that ppu cost u? my 3870 x2 only costed me $400 cdn ...... as gamers really how much are we willing to spend on our equipment?

Regen:

Some news from the front:

Supported:
Radeon HD 3x00 Series
Radeon HD 2x00 Series

Unsupported:
Radeon HD 4x00 Series
CrossFire and CrossFireX (Runs in Single GPU mode)

Unknown:
Radeon HD 3870 X2
Radeon HD 3850 X2
Radeon X1000 Series and below


You didnt mention if 3870 Crossfire is supported?

I think what people will pay depends on how they perceive the returns....personally I only bought the PPU card recently for £50 as I believe Physx is now going to take off with Nvidia behind it and I wanted to get Physx into my ATi system (didn't know about this project at that time) But even if I had known of this project I still would have gone down the dedicated physx card route because of the increased performance aspect ( but would have prefered to have got a graphics card as the dedicated Physx card as the Ageia card only uses the PCI interface)

ya , i am gonna wait.I think if physx stays, it will have to be a standard i.e. Ati has to accept it. I would like to see this project take off.....

It would be really nice if support was added so you could . . . run a card independently for physx in your system and not as a GPU

bro.. i was able to run demo(physx) with ati too... just that i'm not doing any mode.. just lucky with installing some stuff... now downloading the vintage..going to check out if it does effect the score..

PhysX sounds GREAT! The big question is... How far down the list of ATI video cards will PhysX support? I myself have 2 computers with ATI cards in them. A 3650 and a X1650PRO. Both have 512MB of RAM.

excited but a bit disappointing at the same time. Lack of support fot AMD's high end cards and configurations? Is that a sell out in return for NV support? Is it planned for the future or is someone else gong to have to take the project from there?

Sell out? No. it’s due to software limitation and lack of developer support from AMD.

What happened to the "AMD open letter" thread?

I'm wondering how can you be converting CUDA from nvidia's Archi to ATI's one...
I mean they're really different, G80/G92 is made for Cuda etc... and R600/RV670 doesn't even have cache on its SP ! (RV770 has)

So this brings two questions : How will you be able to workaround these lacking features on ATI's Archi without quite huge performance drop ? Or will these just stay unsupported ?

thx again, this is a great work.

So what happens if Physx and Havok become available cross-platform? Then what ..... wouldn't it then become the developers decision? kinda like d3d vs opengl?

physx on ATI, never gonna happen.

I would like to know that as well, did they yield?

Removed by request of someone nice (no, not AMD).

Great questions, I don't know yet, we are still trying to sort out a few things.