nVidia seem to be a sacre cow to the USA justice - demanding paimant (fon not used by most) SLI (purely softwere, btw) and now forbidding the use of their cards as secondary (if not stopped, the'll block Lucid Hydra use too!).

Uhm Intel owns Havok =)

I don't think AMD could legally allow its GPU to process Physx and I suppose their pride gets in the way of them supporting it officially... the same way they did not want to support CUDA when Nvidia said they were open to that. Although I'm sure Nvidia was teasing them all along which did not help things along as I'm sure Nvidia is happy given the way AMD is doing things on the compute business at this time.

Nvidia will need to focus on refining Fermi on the next couple of shrinks if they know what is good for them...

We're up to six cores and eight threads in desktop computers. Use those for physics.

With the growing support of OpenCL it could be a standard praxis shortly to leave your old gfx card in the system as a pure computational entity.

PhysX is dead, who cares for a proprietary API when there is open platforms with wider support.

ATI/AMD and Havok? they were flirting some time back when when PhysX was showing off some strength.

You almost feel bad for nVidia, they had a good thing going with AMD for a while, and after that AMD mergede with ATI they can't even go to Intel without being pushed away or ignored, they are trying to go for themselves with the whole HPC thing but yeah even there they can't be left alone with ATI showing some strength there as well.

But yeah, I pretty much turned away from nVidia after the merge of AMD and ATI, not for fanboyism, but because they released HD48XX series for a great great price.

When the whole Physx ball started rolling it was with dedicated add-in cards... do these cards still work? If so, why cant you just buy one of those and throw it into an AMD rig?

sure would be something if AMD could tweak their stuff and sneak in PhysX support on their latest GPUs, without officially supporting it and having to pay royalties to nV for the trademark.

I doubt the 5xxx series cards would support it without having being designed for it from the get-go, so hopefully they'll sneak it in for the 6xxx series.