I would like to update you about what’s going on. First, we were very pleased to see so many users and readers have applied to our Beta Test Program! To be specific: 191 users, 5 spies and 2 double agents have submitted applications during the last week. Those that will be chosen will be informed early before the beta is available – we can’t still point to “when” at this stage.

The bad news is we still don’t have access to any HD 4800 hardware yet. It is very important for this project to receive AMD’s support on both developer and PR levels. It seems that AMD still is not being cooperative, we get the feeling that they want this project to fail. Perhaps their plans are to strangle PhysX since AMD and Intel have Havok. We truly hope this is not the case since “format wars” are really bad for the consumers (For example: Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD).

Before we get to the good news, I’m going to ask you to hold on to something steady as some of you are going to feel a bit dizzy after you hear this. The truth is… Nvidia is now helping us with the project and it seems they are giving us their blessings. It’s very impressive, inspiring and motivating to see Nvidia's view on this. Why they help us? My best guess would be: They probably want to take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the latest Havok threat from both AMD and Intel.

Some other good news, we are getting a lot of help from cool journalists like Theo Valich to address the HD 4800 access issue. I can confirm that our CUDA Radeon library is almost done and everything is going as planned on this side. 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.