amd physics card in crossfire

[norseamd]

so a long time i thought i read something about being able to hook another amd card in crossfire and set it in catalyst to act as a physics card like you can do with nvidia.

can you do this?

 

[Techhog]

AMD doesn't even have anything like PhysX (or at least nothing that developers actually use), so no. PhysX is an Nvidia feature.

 

[norseamd]

can you use a cuda card for physx with amd gpus

 

[Keysplayr]

No. AMD never licensed PhysX from Nvidia, so PhysX is disabled for any add in Nvidia card when there is no main Nvidia card present. There have been hacks in the past to get this to work. Don't know if anyone still does.

 

[Techhog]

No. AMD never licensed PhysX from Nvidia, so PhysX is disabled for any add in Nvidia card when there is no main Nvidia card present. There have been hacks in the past to get this to work. Don't know if anyone still does.

Yeah, I'm sure that it's all on AMD and that Nvidia would not be against letting them have a license. 🙄

 

[chimaxi83]

Yeah, I'm sure that it's all on AMD and that Nvidia would not be against letting them have a license. 🙄

What he said is absolutely accurate. They could have licensed PhysX, and we AMD owners could have been enjoying it all this time. It's entirely on AMD for not having done so. Nvidia never shut them out of licensing PhysX and writing their own CUDA driver for it. I believe this goes back to when they were just ATI.

 

[norseamd]

What he said is absolutely accurate. They could have licensed PhysX, and we AMD owners could have been enjoying it all this time. It's entirely on AMD for not having done so. Nvidia never shut them out of licensing PhysX and writing their own CUDA driver for it. I believe this goes back to when they were just ATI.

links?

 

[SPBHM]

GPU physics is irrelevant, because it's dominated by Nvidia proprietary tech (PhysX), and hold very little appeal for game devs (well, that is, if they are not being sponsored by Nvidia, like Mantle let's say) so there are very few games with PhysX GPU acceleration,

AMD never really invested much in it, only a few open source and Havok (onwed by Intel I think) demos...

nvidia could make GPU physX relevant if they allowed other hardware to run it (porting to OpenCL for example), and didn't disable the use of their own hardware dedicated for that end when they detect other non nvidia GPU is doing the regular rendering.

 

[norseamd]

GPU physics is irrelevant, because it's dominated by Nvidia proprietary tech (PhysX), and hold very little appeal for game devs (well, that is, if they are not being sponsored by Nvidia, like Mantle let's say) so there are very few games with PhysX GPU acceleration, AMD never really invested much in it, only a few open source and Havok (onwed by Intel I think) demos... nvidia could make GPU physX relevant if they allowed other hardware to run it (porting to OpenCL for example), and didn't disable the use of their own hardware dedicated for that end when they detect other non nvidia GPU is doing the regular rendering.

would it be possible to turn a amd gpu into a pure ppu with open cl or some other kind of compute or physics language?

 

[nurturedhate]

would it be possible to turn a amd gpu into a pure ppu with open cl or some other kind of compute or physics language?

Possible? Yes. Do you have interest in coding your own physics engine and then writing a game to use it also?

 

[Techhog]

What he said is absolutely accurate. They could have licensed PhysX, and we AMD owners could have been enjoying it all this time. It's entirely on AMD for not having done so. Nvidia never shut them out of licensing PhysX and writing their own CUDA driver for it. I believe this goes back to when they were just ATI.

That's assuming that Nvidia didn't charge a ludicrous amount for it.

 

[MrK6]

What he said is absolutely accurate. They could have licensed PhysX, and we AMD owners could have been enjoying it all this time. It's entirely on AMD for not having done so. Nvidia never shut them out of licensing PhysX and writing their own CUDA driver for it. I believe this goes back to when they were just ATI.

Those <1 decent games a year would have changed our lives, to think... 🙄

 

[richaron]

I remember a Kaveri slide which mentioned something like this (with Mantle?).

The example given was using the TrueAudio DSP & GCN ~compute units~ on die for physics while using a dGPU for rendering. Not sure why they'd limit this to APUs when all GCN 1.1 cards have this functionality.

 

[chimaxi83]

Those <1 decent games a year would have changed our lives, to think... 🙄

Lol you're right about that. That's a whole other topic. I like it in Batman though, I guess.

 

[wand3r3r]

I still prefer Physx in BL2, despite the massive performance penalty. Then again that's not really the topic of this thread.

As the others stated no, it's not possible without hacks. The blame game is pointless without a single fact (license pricing or restrictions etc.). I'd prefer both Physx and Mantle to be open and used/developed further by both, I think they both would have improved uses, then again that's also not really the topic of this thread.