Following the NGOHQ episode with devising software that lets users accelerate GPU-based NVIDIA PhysX API on Radeon accelerators, and with NVIDIA coming in support of such an effort, a general opinion was made that NVIDIA sought an industry-wide domination of CUDA as the de-facto general purporse graphics processing (GPGPU) architecture, with putting their investment of acquiring Ageia Technologies to good use by pushing the PhysX API. Although it comes as a good news for AMD that their graphics cards that are already optimized for Havoc physics could now support PhysX acceleration, it's not in the best interests of the company that they allow the growth of CUDA and components based on it to this extent, since AMD has its own FireStream line of products and a GPGPU architecture in the making.

TG Daily spoke with Richard Huddy, Manager of Worldwide Developer Relations, and Godfrey Cheng, Director of Product Marketing, two key individuals with AMD. When it comes to the most interesting question of PhysX implementation on Radeon, Mr. Cheng says that AMD has no problems encouraging the use of feature-enhancing 'middleware', and that they have no arguments in NVIDIA going ahead with propogating their PhysX middleware as long as they don't put Radeon accelerators into a unfair disadvantage.

Eran Badit of the NGOHQ ATI PhysX driver fame now joins the NVIDIA developer program. In a more assertive statement, he believes that NVIDIA wants to "take on Intel with CUDA and to deal with the 'latest' Havok threat from both AMD and Intel.".

In a conversation with TG Daily, Roy Taylor, vice president of developer relations for NVIDIA says: "Eran and I have been talking via email and we have invited him to join NVIDIA's registered developer program. We are delighted at his interest in CUDA and in GPU accelerated physics using PhysX. Eran joins a long line of developers who are now working on using the GPU to run physics and who are doing so with the world's leading physics software - PhysX. "

Derek Perez, in charge of Nvidia's PR department, joined Taylor with this statement:
"We'll help any and all developers are using CUDA. That includes tools…documentation…and hands on help. We're delighted with the interest in CUDA and PhysX; and that includes the news on www.ngohq.com."

Once feared by many for aggressively defending its intellectual property, NVIDIA seems to have changed its approach towards things. In a bid to popularize their technology, it is willing to give the 'PhysX advantage' to even its competitor, AMD. But it still remains to be seen if PhysX performs on Radeon "the way it's meant to perform", now with Eran Badit working in close collaboration with NVIDIA. He says he still awaits samples from AMD so he could devise PhysX drivers for them. Surely NVIDIA has brought in good days for small developers with big aspirations.

Amidst this whole 'nGOHQ' saga, and us getting astonished at the way things turned out, here's what we missed:

NVIDIA is in talks with AMD over a possible technology-transfer agreement over PhysX, say industry sources in Hong Kong. In a not-so-recent article by HKEPC, it is said:

In a dramatic turnaround of events, NGOHQ.com, the creators of a special system software that allowed users of the ATI Radeon graphics accelerators to use proprietary features of NVIDIA graphics accelerators such as GPU-accelerated version of the NVIDIA PhysX game physics API, claim that in fact NVIDIA wanted to help them with this effort. On June, the 26th we had covered reports of the said outfit improvising a driver after proving that NVIDIA's proprietary GPGPU architecture, CUDA was flexible enough to work on a ATI RV670 graphics processor.

Eran Badit of NGOHQ.com successfully modified NVIDIA CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) to operate on an ATI GPU and has been able to run the NVIDIA PhysX layer on an RV670, the Radeon HD 3850.

He tells that enabling PhysX support on Radeon cards is not particularly difficult, leading us to believe that physics on graphics cards may not so much be a technology problem but an issue of corporate dynamics.

On his first run, Eran got a 22,606 CPU score in 3D Mark Vantage, enhancing the overall score to P4262. A comparable system without PhysX-support will cross the finish line at about P3800.

NVIDIA Releases Beta PhysX Driver For Public

NVIDIA releases the beta driver 177.39 for PhysX support on some GeForce GPU's. They have also said that a new stable driver, the WHQL 177.44 sans PhysX support would be released later today.

Depending on your Windows setup, you can download the driver from these locations: (please note, it is a beta driver, refer to the "Products Supported" tab for a list of supported products)

32-bit Windows Vista | 64-bit Windows Vista
32-bit Windows XP | 64-bit Windows XP