The Death of PhysX?

Until recently, Nvidia drivers allowed you to use one of their GPU's as a hardware physx card while using an ATI card as your GPU. Not anymore. With the new drivers from Nvidia, anyone using an ATI card is now locked out of the physx world. I can understand this from a corporate (f*cking greedy) standpoint. Nvidia wants you to purchase an Nvidia GPU and a second Nvidia GPU for your physx. But what about the gamers? They are getting screwed here!

First off: fanboys stfu. This is good for no one. Having physics disabled in all systems running ATI graphics cards means the physics user base just got a lot smaller. Developers are going to look at this and say, "Do we really want to use physx when all ATI users will not be unable to see the fancy effects?" They will probably use Havok or an alternative.

I was a huge fan of physx when they first came out. I thought the technology  was great and I hoped that more developers would support it. I was actually pleased when Nvidia purchased the company. I figured it would be nice to have that kind of marketing muscle pushing developers to take advantage of it.

I believe Neil Robinson of ATI said it best:

"Physics can be a good thing for gamers, but it should be for all gamers. When it's available for everyone, game developers will be able to make physics an integral part of gameplay, rather than just extra eye candy. This requires a physics solution built on industry standards. That's why DirectX 11 is such a great inflection point for our industry - DirectCompute allows game physics that can be enjoyed by everyone. There are several initiatives (some open-source) that will deliver awesome GPU-based physics for everyone, using either DirectCompute or OpenCL. Industry standards will make any proprietary standard irrelevant. There's a real discrepancy between what Nvidia says, and what they do. They 'say' that they are looking out for gamers' best interests. However, decisions like this are the exact opposite of gamers' best interests."