PPU PhysX disabled for ATI too?

[ViRGE]

Originally posted by: veri745

Originally posted by: konakona

Personally I see nothing more at play here than standard cost-cutting business decisions being made by a company that operates in a competitive market.

I don't see how placing an artificially adding a block that did not exist previously could pass as a cost-cutting measure. From moralistic accusations aside, the least they could have done was maybe discontinue formal support for the non-nvidia gpu, or add a disclaimer to notify their customers of it. Isn't it a bit suspicious to put it nicely, that they had to actively invent a 'feature' to cut the costs? Adding extra lines in the code should have cost the money you know, however little that might have been. Sorry if I come off as being too technical, but I just cant' accept that their true intent was to cut the cost. They could have just left it alone instead of altering it only to harm their reputation.

It seems like an awfully questionable decision to me to me, but I could see it as being a cost-cutting measure if support for old Physx hardware was breaking new features.

It works like this: every time they update their drivers, they have to verify that it doesn't break on old hardware. It's possible that they didn't just add lines of code to disable the PPU with ATI hardware, but that they were able to remove LOTS of code that included workarounds for the old hardware. This would also cut lots of time out of validation.

Sometimes supporting forward compatibility is a bitch.

Again, I don't really buy this argument myself, but it's a possibility.

Bear in mind that NVIDIA has already discontinued support for the PPU at the SDK level. SDK version 2.8.1 was the last version to support the PPU. Projects built against SDK 2.8.3 or later can only be accelerated by a GPU, largely as a product of features added to the SDK that the PPU can't handle.

 

[alcoholbob]

nvidia may as well release a patch that disables 3d rendering of all pre-geforce 6 video cards with a popup "sorry, your video card does not meet the minimum requirements for 3D acceleration of this application."

 

[atran5e]

I think no ATI users, bought a PPU card before Batman came out, nor did they use NV cards for PhysX. Now a worthy title came out and the red side is raging


Drama

 

[F1shF4t]

Originally posted by: Forumpanda

Originally posted by: Atechie
First the red team declare that PhysX is useless...and then they whine when they can't useit...get real :roll:

You do realize that the first requirement to complain about that move is actually having purchased nVidia graphics cards? (or the 2 people that who bought the PPU).
I'm not sure mocking people for buying nVidia hardware is a good way to create returning customers.

I think this point is greatly overlooked. This only hurts nvidia customers who have either bought a nvidia card before and upgraded to ati later or ones who wanted/did buy a nvidia card purely for PhysX.

People who have ati cards already know they don't support PhysX, so what is there to complain about? I have two ati cards, it doesn't matter if PhysX only works during a full moon, doesn't affect me the slightest. If however I had a good 8800gt or similar which could be used, then I might be a bit more annoyed.

Seems very stupid to alianate you customer base, especially when it doesn't affect your competition (Yes I know it may persuade some people to buy a nvidia card, but it can also do the opposite)

 

[nismotigerwvu]

It really breaks down to this:

What Nvidia thinks is happening:
Some consumers were buying lower-end cards purely for physx. Some of them already had ATI GPU's as their primary. Nvidia sees this as lost profits, as they didn't sell them a $300 part.

What really is happening:
The people buying the low-end card dedicated to phsyx were only willing to invest that <$100 into an Nvidia product at this time. Being locked from hybrids, they will no longer purchase any Nvidia product.

Makes great business right? I mean wouldn't you rather not sell anything?

 

[Equ1n0x]

I've been a long time customer of NVidia products. I've owned maybe 1 ATI card for every 3 Nvidia products I've had. I have a GTX 260. After this, and the intentional crippling of AA on B:AA with ATI cards, I'm seriously rethinking that position.

The justifications for doing this in this thread don't fly with normal people (non-fanboys and non-nvidia employees). As someone else mentioned, this would be like owning a printer, and an NVidia driver update disabling your printer.

In light of that, it is likely that in the future I will go out of my way to choose ATI instead of NVidia. That's not "spiteful", as was implied earlier, that's called voting with my wallet. I don't buy products from companies with harmful business practices in other area if I can in anyway avoid it, why would I buy from a technology company that has unethical business practices?

Complaining that someone else once did something wrong doesn't earn NVidia a pass, either. NVidia will get a pass when they re-enable PPU's for customer that bought PhysX cards, and immediately cease manipulating game developers to disadvantage ATI. They don't get a pass because somewhere, at some other period of time someone else did something - they have to correct their mistakes.

 

[Equ1n0x]

"[/quote]Bear in mind that NVIDIA has already discontinued support for the PPU at the SDK level. SDK version 2.8.1 was the last version to support the PPU. Projects built against SDK 2.8.3 or later can only be accelerated by a GPU, largely as a product of features added to the SDK that the PPU can't handle.[/quote]"

That's fine. It doesn't mean you intentionally BREAK it, which is what they did. This wasn't accidental - this was done with the intent of making sure that customers with other GPU's in their systems will have NO support for PhysX.

Personally, I don't care about PhysX. I *DO* care about features like AA, and when you start manipulating developers to break things for the competition and intentionally break things so that customers can't have more than one video card in their system, that's anti-competitive.

 

[T2k]

Originally posted by: F1shF4t
People who have ati cards already know they don't support PhysX, so what is there to complain about?

The fact that my PhysX PCI card becomes worthless after a driver upgrade...?

 

[Schmide]

Originally posted by: T2k
The fact that my PhysX PCI card becomes worthless after a driver upgrade...?

Point taken, but your PhysX PCI card was worthless before the driver upgrade. What's the value of the game?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Equ1n0x
I've been a long time customer of NVidia products. I've owned maybe 1 ATI card for every 3 Nvidia products I've had. I have a GTX 260. After this, and the intentional crippling of AA on B:AA with ATI cards, I'm seriously rethinking that position.

The justifications for doing this in this thread don't fly with normal people (non-fanboys and non-nvidia employees). As someone else mentioned, this would be like owning a printer, and an NVidia driver update disabling your printer.

In light of that, it is likely that in the future I will go out of my way to choose ATI instead of NVidia. That's not "spiteful", as was implied earlier, that's called voting with my wallet. I don't buy products from companies with harmful business practices in other area if I can in anyway avoid it, why would I buy from a technology company that has unethical business practices?

Complaining that someone else once did something wrong doesn't earn NVidia a pass, either. NVidia will get a pass when they re-enable PPU's for customer that bought PhysX cards, and immediately cease manipulating game developers to disadvantage ATI. They don't get a pass because somewhere, at some other period of time someone else did something - they have to correct their mistakes.

GREAT first post.

 

[Equ1n0x]

[/quote]

GREAT first post.
[/quote]

Thanks, I re-registered just to post that. It's been a while since I've been on the forums and I don't remember my password or the email address I used to register originally.

 

[T2k]

Originally posted by: Schmide

Originally posted by: T2k
The fact that my PhysX PCI card becomes worthless after a driver upgrade...?

Point taken, but your PhysX PCI card was worthless before the driver upgrade. What's the value of the game?

Ehh? Any PhysX-enabled game was able to use it - so how was is worthless exactly...?

If it works, it alleviates things for my GPU (or CPU.) When Nvidia decides to fuck up my PPU drivers then everything goes back to my CPU or GPU.

People really needs to stop throwing around cliches.

 

[Chooch731]

New guy to the forums here but i thought i might post to clarify something
Geforce Physx is disabled with there is an ATI card present.
Ageia Physx (for those with the PPU) is still active.

http://s873.photobucket.com/al...view&current=physx.jpg
(8.09.04 physx drivers)

http://s873.photobucket.com/al...iew&current=physx2.jpg
(909.08.14 physx drivers)

I run 2x 4890's and a 100 series PCI-E Physx PPU and i can tell you with the latest drivers it works. The fan on the PPU only turns on when Physx is being processed. Load MOH airbourne and the fan spins and maybe you might notice some minute differences when playing

 

[Red Irish]

Originally posted by: VirtualLarry

Originally posted by: Equ1n0x
I've been a long time customer of NVidia products. I've owned maybe 1 ATI card for every 3 Nvidia products I've had. I have a GTX 260. After this, and the intentional crippling of AA on B:AA with ATI cards, I'm seriously rethinking that position.

The justifications for doing this in this thread don't fly with normal people (non-fanboys and non-nvidia employees). As someone else mentioned, this would be like owning a printer, and an NVidia driver update disabling your printer.

In light of that, it is likely that in the future I will go out of my way to choose ATI instead of NVidia. That's not "spiteful", as was implied earlier, that's called voting with my wallet. I don't buy products from companies with harmful business practices in other area if I can in anyway avoid it, why would I buy from a technology company that has unethical business practices?

Complaining that someone else once did something wrong doesn't earn NVidia a pass, either. NVidia will get a pass when they re-enable PPU's for customer that bought PhysX cards, and immediately cease manipulating game developers to disadvantage ATI. They don't get a pass because somewhere, at some other period of time someone else did something - they have to correct their mistakes.

GREAT first post.

Agreed

 

[nitromullet]

Originally posted by: nismotigerwvu
It really breaks down to this:

What Nvidia thinks is happening:
Some consumers were buying lower-end cards purely for physx. Some of them already had ATI GPU's as their primary. Nvidia sees this as lost profits, as they didn't sell them a $300 part.

What really is happening:
The people buying the low-end card dedicated to phsyx were only willing to invest that <$100 into an Nvidia product at this time. Being locked from hybrids, they will no longer purchase any Nvidia product.

Makes great business right? I mean wouldn't you rather not sell anything?

While I agree with the sentiment of your post, I don't think this is an accurate depiction of what's happening. I think most people who would have used an NV gpu as a PhysX card along with an ATI primary card are people who already own a NVIDIA gpu and wanted to add the ATI card to the mix. I don't think NVIDIA is losing a significant amount of sales to people wanting to buy a stand alone PhysX card, but I would imagine that by reducing the effective value of someone's existing purchase they may have lost a future purchase.

Take my situation for example... I sold a GTX 280 at a significant loss, and replaced it with an HD 5870. I would have like to have kept the GTX 280 to run as a PhysX card. Sure, one could say that it was my choice to sell NV and buy ATI, and it was... However, the decision to go with the ATI card in the first place (and not wait for NV's next gen) was sealed when I found out about NVIDIA's shenanigans with Batman:AA. I think NVIDIA grossly underestimates the value of maintaining a level of goodwill with customers as a long term business strategy.

 

[Aim64C]

I run 2x 4890's and a 100 series PCI-E Physx PPU and i can tell you with the latest drivers it works. The fan on the PPU only turns on when Physx is being processed. Load MOH airbourne and the fan spins and maybe you might notice some minute differences when playing

I run the PCI version from ASUS. The PCI and PCI-E versions are identical - the PCI-E just has a PCI bus to PCI-E bus adapter (which is why there is no frame-rate improvement between the two models - the PCI bus creates a frequency bottleneck, even though the data-rate of the PCI bus is adequate for the amount of data being sent back and forth). The fan spins period.

That said - I've seen it confirmed on several other sites that the PPU is disabled. My own PPU cannot be located and used for hardware rendering utilizing any physx code - though it shows up in the device manager and in the Nvidia control panel.

The programs will run through and search for CUDA-enabled devices, and then the PPU. Since I am running XP64 and a 7950 GPU - my PhysX hardware mode is disabled due to a weird way Nvidia enacted their coding (cool how my Nvidia card doesn't count anymore).

It works like this: every time they update their drivers, they have to verify that it doesn't break on old hardware. It's possible that they didn't just add lines of code to disable the PPU with ATI hardware, but that they were able to remove LOTS of code that included workarounds for the old hardware. This would also cut lots of time out of validation.

This is incorrect. PhysX now runs off of CUDA - which runs completely independent of graphics processes. That, or it runs off of AGEIA's card - the specifics of which are not known. Nvidia runs into more bugs trying to get PhysX and Graphics to run on the same GPU than it would to run graphics on an ATI card and PhysX on an Nvidia card.

Bear in mind that NVIDIA has already discontinued support for the PPU at the SDK level. SDK version 2.8.1 was the last version to support the PPU. Projects built against SDK 2.8.3 or later can only be accelerated by a GPU, largely as a product of features added to the SDK that the PPU can't handle.

The reason Nvidia discontinued support for the PPU (which is actually a far superior design when it comes to PhysX processing) is because it is an old product that requires heaps of additional coding to support as it is not just an expansion of CUDA. It's more work to support the PPU and its architecture - and it's an older product that is not really good for anything outside of being an aid to simulations.

And Nvidia isn't going to make a dedicated PPU based on the architecture, even though it is a superior PhysX architecture (yes, GPUs get a higher score.... they also run at about four times the clock speed and have about eight times the number of 'shaders' - I'm talking about architecture, which is different from benchmark scoring). A new PhysX card is not going to draw Nvidia any profits any time soon, and it would simply split their development down the middle.

All this boils down to is Nvidia trying to push CUDA.

The whole reason ATI didn't take up PhysX was because for PhysX to work on ATI cards, it would have to adopt CUDA. ATI already had its competing stream-computing solution.

Of course, now that we have OpenCL, AMD/ATI have ported their format (which is, more or less, free) and started backing Bullet - it will more or less choke out proprietary formats like PhysX.

Now all I want to know is if my darn PPU will be able to utilize OpenCL. I mostly want it to help in simulations - not gaming, but I see no reason why it couldn't support OpenCL, other than it is an older product that had a small consumer base to begin with.