User Containforum, known for his detailed video guide for Hybrid PhysX systems, has published another video – it describes somewhat tricky way to bypass Catalyst Control Center and extended display incompatibility, brought with recent 10.2 Catalyst drivers.

Moreover, after you’ll apply this fix you’ll will be able to use dedicated Nvidia GPU for PhysX – without necessity to extend display. Yep, mouse cursor won’t jump off the screen now.

PhysX FluidMark is popular benchmarking application, that is often used to test stability and performance of GPU PhysX configurations. It performs PhysX SDK based SPH Fluids particle simulation, which can be calculated on CPU or compatible Nvidia GPU, however, only one CPU core can be used in first case.

After all those “Multi-Core CPU Support Is Disabled in PhysX” claims by AMD and following hype, JeGX (FluidMark developer) decided to leverage multi-threading capabilities of PhysX SDK and augment FluidMark with actual multi-core CPU support.

According to short preview, published today – task was successful.

As you may see, updated version of FluidMark, running on JeGX dev. machine with ATI Radeon HD 5770 GPU, is fully utilizing both cores of AMD X2 3800+ CPU.

Update: JeGX revealed another screenshot from upcoming FluidMark with multi-core PhysX support, running on all four cores of quad core Intel Core 2 Extreme X9650 CPU.

Previous version of multi-core FluidMark was able to load only dual-core CPU, but this, updated one – can utilize  quad-core or even n-core CPU.

Update #2: And now – FluidMark running on 16 CPU Cores.

Earlier this month, AMD critized Nvidia again, this time on crippling PhysX multi-threaded capabilities.

“When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multicore implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. That’s pretty shabby! I wonder why Nvidia has done that?” said Richard Huddy, AMD worldwide developer relations manager, in an interview with Bit-tech.com

“It’s the same thing as Intel’s old compiler tricks that it used to do; Nvidia simply takes out all the multicore optimisations in PhysX. In fact, if coded well, the CPU can tackle most of the physics situations presented to it.”

Tomshardware asked Nvidia for its responce for such allegations, and here is an answer by Nadeem Mohammad, PhysX director of product management:

I have been a member of the PhysX team, first with AEGIA, and then with NVIDIA, and I can honestly say that since the merger with NVIDIA there have been no changes to the SDK code which purposely reduces the software performance of PhysX or its use of CPU multi-cores.

Our PhysX SDK API is designed such that thread control is done explicitly by the application developer, not by the SDK functions themselves. One of the best examples is 3DMarkVantage which can use 12 threads while running in software-only PhysX. This can easily be tested by anyone with a multi-core CPU system and a PhysX-capable GeForce GPU. This level of multi-core support and programming methodology has not changed since day one. And to anticipate another ridiculous claim, it would be nonsense to say we “tuned” PhysX multi-core support for this case.

PhysX is a cross platform solution. Our SDKs and tools are available for the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360, the PC and even the iPhone through one of our partners. We continue to invest substantial resources into improving PhysX support on ALL platforms–not just for those supporting GPU acceleration.

As is par for the course, this is yet another completely unsubstantiated accusation made by an employee of one of our competitors. I am writing here to address it directly and call it for what it is, completely false. NVIDIA PhysX fully supports multi-core CPUs and multithreaded applications, period. Our developer tools allow developers to design their use of PhysX in PC games to take full advantage of multi-core CPUs and to fully use the multithreaded capabilities.

Source: nTersect Blog

Year ago AMD’s opinion on PhysX was clear enough – it will die, if it remains a closed and proprietary standard.

Recently Bit-tech.net has published massive interview with Richard Huddy, AMD’s Worldwide Developer Relations manager, on game development,  competition’s progress, DX11 and other technologies. Of course, few words were said about PhysX – let’s focus on that and see what has changed for the past year.

About Batman Arkham Asylum (Link)

[Nvidia] put PhsyX in there, and that’s the one I’ve got a reasonable amount of respect for. Even though I don’t think PhysX – a proprietary standard – is the right way to go, despite Nvidia touting it as an “open standard” and how it would be “more than happy to license it to AMD“, but [Nvidia] won’t. It’s just not true! You know the way it is, it’s simply something [Nvidia] would not do and they can publically say that as often as it likes and know that it won’t, because we’ve actually had quiet conversations with them and they’ve made it abundantly clear that we can go whistle.

However, PhysX is a piece of technology that changes the gameplay experience and maybe it improves it. What I understand is that they actually invested quite a lot, Nvidia put in a hefty engineering time and they tried to make a difference to the game. So, in that aspect, I have respect for it; it’s a reasonable way to handle the situation given the investment in PhysX. Nvidia wanted a co-marketing deal and put forward PhysX, and Rocksteady and Eidos said, OK, as long as you do it – which they did.

Our commentary: It’s now hard to call PhysX irrelevant, when you have played Batman, isn’t it ? Another interesting part is different look on that ATI-NV PhysX licensing situation.

About ATI+NV PhysX setups ban (Link) | Nvidia’s position

They don’t want to QA it. The PC is an open platform, though – you’re meant to take any two parts and put them together. Intel don’t say “we’re not prepared to QA our CPUs with Nvidia or AMD’s graphics parts” when they obviously spend time QAing them because you want to build a system that works.

Our commentary: Yes, it’s looking, let’s say, not right for us too. That’s why we are doing our best to support PhysX Hybrids idea.

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