NVIDIA Sheds Light On Lack Of PhysX CPU Optimizations @ HotHardware

This is a pretty good read for those of you that have been following some of the PhysX drama that has hit the websphere.  The back story here is that someone discovered that PhysX didn't run well on a CPU and claimed that nVidia purposefully crippled it.  While reports like this rarely make headlines there is always a curiosity factor that needs to be taken into consideration.

About four months ago, we covered the latest round of shin-kicking between ATI and NVIDIA, with ATI claiming that NVIDIA purposefully crippled CPU performance when running PhysX code and coerced developers to make use of it. NVIDIA denied all such claims, particularly those that implied it used its "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" program as a bludgeon to force hardware PhysX on developers or gamers.

A new report has dug into how PhysX is executed on a standard x86 CPU; the analysis confirms some of AMD's earlier statements...

We have also taken a look at PhysX performance in the past, but from the standpoint of what hardware configuration will give you the best performance.  One of the testing points was to enable PhysX without an nVidia card in the system (ie run it on the CPU).  As you can imagine performance was horrible but justified considering the architecture of a GPU vs that of a CPU.  The GPU can just do certain things faster than if you ran them from a CPU directly. 

Related Web URL: http://hothardware.com/articles/NVIDIA-Sheds-Light...