gotta love royalties! if Nvidia gets PhysX onto all hardware, it will be the obvious choice for game developers. Nvidia would be able to just sit back and relax while other people pay them to use their engine. Sounds like a good idea to me. Besides, they will still make more money in the hardware market, anyway. Plus, if it works on other platforms, other developers will be essentially contributing to Nvidia'a Software R&D departments, and paying royalties on the software, too.

thetiminator69

It could also be that Nvidia is interested in control of a particular aspect of game development, separate from profits from their cards.

Aaron Martin-Colby

And you would think Nvidia and ATI could never get along!!

...Oh boy.

bobide

if porting your software to your competitors hardware, makes their hardware run faster, doesn't that hurt your sales? Is it thay they hope the industry will completely adopt the physix engine, and then shortly after, nvida will stop releasing updates to amd's cards? There is something going on here, and I'm just not quite seeing the whole picture. But then again none of us might actually come to understand this move, until years in the future, or not.

jkr2

Wow, that's big of them.

ripfire

Swolling....?

Jrsy

Its actually a brilliant strategy.

Disregarding the loss of sales, which might be difficult to speculate, if PhysX becomes the popular physics engine for ATI cards over Havoc then ATI will just lose money from licensing Havoc. If ATI wishes to ever support PhysX officially, they will have to start paying Nvidia royalties. They won't even be able to advertise how well PhysX performs on their cards unless they start paying Nvidia. Whether or not Nvidia loses sales on hardware would be due to how well their own hardware performs and what it is priced out. That would be the case even if ATI ran Havoc so its not really a big potential risk of loss for Nvidia to support PhysX on ATI hardware.

battlehamster

See, the problem for AMD/ATI here is that this is still unlicensed. Let's say that the modders achieve 100% compatibility. Hell, let's even say that it works better on ATI. The catch is that AMD can never say that, advertise it or even mention it. If they ever do, it means either big licencing fees or a lawsuit.

Ryan H

Didn't AMD just lay off over 10% of its workforce? I'm sure they've got some lazy engineers hanging around doing nothing to throw at this project.

dingus

So Nvidia is helping promote its own physics engine over the Intel licensed Havok?

Why would they do that to Intel???
I thought they were BFF!

tex1ntux

Yeah, like Nvidia is a descendent of the Carebears, and is now throwing a "care ray" or "love force" or something really cute from their belly, and just want to help out everybody out there to have some nice physics on their games so everybody can smile and eat chocolate.

NAHT

i really hope they blow up, i'm sure they are on something more evil than just seem nice and show how their Physics engine are better.

laio

AMD you dissapoint. I thought you didn't suck as much as everyone says you do. (Yeah, they say it.)

oo0cyst0oo

Ooo, clever move nVidia. I thought it was just to insult puny ATi but it's doubly good for winning developers and ultimately deciding that PhysX is more of a necessity than Havok.

Havok sure has been around a hell of a lot longer though, so good luck with that. If I can see different ragdoll physics and not recognize the same ones from game to game though then I'll go for PhysX personally.

Absent Blue

Good move by Nvidia, in some way it's like they are making fun of Amd

Mike918

nvidia looks like the good guys, way to go ! fight the battle any way you can !

waza

If Nvidia's and ATI's relationship is anything like most major companies... the supposed fighting you conceive between them is all a mirage for marketing. The actual engineers and workers usually talk to each other and often help each other out. You guys buy into marketing speak way too easily.

DarkNight_DS

It's funny they are throwing assloads of support behind this effort yet they won't give the Noveau project the time of day. Marketing at its best.

John Laur

Nvidia's doing it to look good. When it comes down to people upgrading, the ones who have no idea what to pick are gonna go for Nvidia after hearing this just because they'll think they're the nice guys.

Fadakar

Wait, has ATI actually said they do not like what these guys are doing and will sue them?

No they are keeping quiet and ignoring them. Why should a company give any resources to something that will help their competitor?

Also who cares, if you want to use the Nvidia engine, buy a Nvidia card.

Zarian