NVIDIA is getting closer to a good PhysX driver for its GeForce 8, GeForce 9 and GeForce GTX graphics cards. A beta driver leaked a while back and people have been trying it out to see what NVIDIA is about to unleash. PhysX works through NVIDIA’s CUDA SDK (Compute Unified Device Architecture), which is used to get NVIDIA’s graphics cards to do more things than just rendering 3D graphics, a so called GPGPU (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units) technology.
With the PhysX driver NVIDIA showed that the acquisition of AGEIA would pay off sooner than expected. The best about it is that it will be completely free of charge.
Astonishingly, someone thought of the idea of going through the CUDA SDK and PhysX SDK to make PhysX run on a graphics card from ATI, also good at running GPGPU applications. Eran Badit at NGOHQ.com, known for his tailored ATI drivers, is the man who came up with the idea. He managed to get PhysX acceleration with a Radeon HD 3870 by making the NVIDIA PhysX application run on the card from the competition.
The results didn’t take long. With PhysX support enabled, he achieved a CPU score of 22,606 that resulted in a final 3DMark Vantage score of P4262. A similar system without the PhysX support should land at P3800. A significant difference.
Alas, Badit doesn’t have access to a card from the Radeon HD 4800 family. We will keep an eye on the development over at NGOHQ, especially how AMD and NVIDIA will respond to this.
