nVidia's PhysX shortsightedness angers developers

If you're making middleware that relies on a specific set of people using it, i.e. game developers - you should be careful of not pissing them off. Last week, we heard that starting with the Release 186.00 of its graphics drivers - nVidia disabled PhysX if you have an ATI Radeon card in the same system.

Now, the number of people who have an ATI Radeon and nVidia GeForce card in the same computer is very, very low. In fact, beside myself [ATI Radeon 4870X2, nVidia Quadro CX] and a few game developers, I don't know who exactly uses such a combo.

JC from NGOHQ.com even got an answer from nVidia on the subject from Troy of nVidia Customer Care:

"Hello JC,

Ill explain why this function was disabled.

Physx is an open software standard any company can freely develop hardware or software that supports it. Nvidia supports GPU accelerated Physx on NVIDIA GPUs while using NVIDIA GPUs for graphics. NVIDIA performs extensive Engineering, Development, and QA work that makes Physx a great experience for customers. For a variety of reasons - some development expense some quality assurance and some business reasons NVIDIA will not support GPU accelerated Physx with NVIDIA GPUs while GPU rendering is happening on non- NVIDIA GPUs. I'm sorry for any inconvenience caused but I hope you can understand.

Best Regards,
Troy
NVIDIA Customer Care"

To us, the mail above makes no sense. First of all, "Troy" wrote PhysX with a small "X" which warranties that nVidia branding caretakers won't be happy. Secondly, the answer means that the game developer support empire that was handled by Roy Taylor is definitely shaking badly.

The thing is, we got contacted by a certain game developer who develops cross-platform title that uses PhysX and for some reason, has both ATI and nVidia graphics cards in several systems. Needless to say, he/she was pissed off.
The comments included non-publishable slang, so the question is - why in the world would nVidia pulled a move such as this one? Furthermore, we were told that the software rendering mode that nVidia is using for PhysX [to demonstrate the difference between a CPU and a GPU] is not exactly working at full speed, but we'll leave that for another story.


Update #1 October 5, 2009 20:30 GMT - We received word from Eran at NGOHQ.com that anonymous forum poster posted an update that re-enables the physics engine rendering when ATI card is present, such as rendering on AGEIA PhysX cards on systems with ATI Radeon graphics. We applaud the community initiative on this one.