amd physics card in crossfire

norseamd

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
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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

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
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AMD doesn't even have anything like PhysX (or at least nothing that developers actually use), so no. PhysX is an Nvidia feature.
 

Keysplayr

Elite Member
Jan 16, 2003
21,219
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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

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
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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. :rolleyes:
 

chimaxi83

Diamond Member
May 18, 2003
5,457
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Yeah, I'm sure that it's all on AMD and that Nvidia would not be against letting them have a license. :rolleyes:

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

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
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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

Diamond Member
Sep 12, 2012
5,068
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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

Lifer
Dec 13, 2013
13,990
180
106
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

Golden Member
Aug 27, 2011
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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

Platinum Member
Sep 11, 2013
2,834
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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

Diamond Member
Aug 9, 2004
4,458
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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... :rolleyes:
 

richaron

Golden Member
Mar 27, 2012
1,357
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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.
 

wand3r3r

Diamond Member
May 16, 2008
3,180
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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.