AGEIA (Creator of PhysX) has fully been absorbed

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Originally Posted by Anarchist

Completely wrong. :rolleyes:

... they would not risk monopoly claim ...

Look up the terms of the Intel/AMD x86 license agreement, you will find a is right. The agreement is not valid overseas.

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Nope you are wrong sorry - on both counts.

The problem with the licence agreement has nothing to do with "not valid overseas". All legal agreements and contracts, including licence agreements, are created/signed under a particular legal jurisdiction. "This agreement is made under the Laws of Delaware US" for example merely means that any problems arising under the contract will be dealt with under the laws and courts of Delaware.

If the license "is not valid overseas" AMD would only be able to sell their processors in the US. The licence clearly contains contractual arrangements that allow AMD to sell their x86 kit anywhere in the world.

EDIT: from the licence "Agreement, Intel hereby grants to AMD a non-exclusive, non-transferable ***** worldwide license")

However ... any contractual problem anywhere in the world under that licence will be dealt with in a Delaware court - or wherever they have specified. (EDIT: I guessed Delaware because fat corporates love the laws there .. guess what? AMD and Intel are both Delaware corporations haha)


There IS a licence problem if Nvidia were to buy AMD. It is a different one. It is believed the wide cross marketing and licencing agreements between Intel and AMD do not allow AMD to transfer intel technology to any third party. EDIT: further research reveals the real culprit to be one of the termination clauses in the contract between them:

(7) the other party undergoes a Change of Control. For
purposes of this Section 6.2(b)(7), "Change of Control"
shall mean a transaction or a series of related
transactions in which (i) one or more related parties
who did not previously own at least a fifty percent
(50%) interest in a party to this Agreement obtain at
least a fifty percent (50%) interest in such party, and,
in the reasonable business judgment of the other party
to this Agreement, such change in ownership will have a
material effect on the other party's business, or (ii) a
party acquires, by merger, acquisition of assets or
otherwise, all or any portion of another legal entity
such that either the assets or market value of such
party after the close of such transaction are greater
than one and one third (1 1/3) of the assets or market
value of such party prior to such transaction.

From X-Bit Labs:

"Perhaps, Jen-Hsun Huang, the chief executive of Nvidia, could re-architect Advanced Micro Devices in order to make it profitable. However, due to the fact that wide cross-licensing agreement between AMD and Intel, which is also believed to cover x86 instruction set, does not allow AMD to transfer any of Intel’s technologies to any third-party. As a result, if AMD is acquired by Nvidia, the new company will not have rights to produce x86 central processing units (CPUs) or utilize any technologies from Intel.

It is uncertain whether Nvidia, or any other company that has no wide cross-licensing agreement with Intel that covers x86 instruction set, is interested in getting AMD and not interested in making CPUs. But what is almost certain is that various antitrust organizations would be against the two suppliers of discrete GPUs becoming one."

EDIT PS I used to be a Merchant Banker by trade and was often involved in drawing up contracts of this type. The publicly released version of this one is hillarious because AMD and INTEL applied for so many passages to be hidden for confidentiality reasons. This is a lovely example:

(c) The parties represent, warrant and covenant that they shall not *****.

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Originally Posted by Crazy Buddhist

4. As to releasing a card with no ports but a GPU I think it is unlikely. If you think about it since the day SLI was released there has been a VERY strong argument for such cards which would offer the scaling of SLI at a lower cost as the second card would have a simpler production, layout, less materials etc. But it hasn't been done. I think Nvidia are moving away from separate PhysX cards with this move and I would be surprised if the AGEIA cards do not come off the shelves relatively quickly. What would an Nvidia GPU with no ports and PhysX incorporated be? It would be a PhysX card and I suspect these are on the way out.

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How wrong. Top end they ARE doing this for research boffins and the like only they call it a "Computing Processor" elsewhere they slip in the "GPU" a la Freud and call it a GPU Computing Processor"....

Tesla C1060 Computing Processor:

These have been on their site for a while now.

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Originally Posted by crenn

It seems you need a dual card solution for this to work well. Performance hit with a single card solution (in games) is quite bad apparently. Any one in Melbourne with a motherboard with dual PCIE 16x slots and a ATi card? I want to try something out...

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Well, a lot of people aren't happy about Vantage getting a boost from an NVidia GPU running PhysX, and that's something that remains to be seen. But the Performance hit I heard about with a single card solution... well, things got interesting.

Someone with 8800GT used a modified INF (so they could use the drivers with their card) tried the PhysX levels in UT3. Here's what has stemmed from that.

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Quite afew people including myself which have 512mb gt's or gts's (g92) seem to get this weird fps bug. Both levels take around 2-3mins to load then they start out all fine and dandy (30-60fps) then after a minute or so they nose dive to under 10fps like someone switched of the PhysX support? :S

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Just a quick follow up regarding PhysX in UT3 and the slow downs...
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...ats-3dmark-177
Copying the file mentioned and i dont get the stuck FPS anymore

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They're refering to this:

This is certainly something to watch, seems that even single card solutions will be able to do this well!

EDIT: Found from this - http://futuremark.yougamers.com/foru...ad.php?t=83625

Thanks for that crenn. I still haven't tried it with my 8800GTX, I will download the driver now.

It doesn't work with anything but the GT200 and G92 cores currently. Remember, that driver isn't an actual BETA driver, but it's basically being treated as one. You'll have to wait sorry.

Still worth the download. You never know. Anyway I can always roll back the driver if I am getting issues.

Just beware, there is an issue in Crysis.

Yeah I heard about that. However I don't have Crysis, I do have the demo for UT3.

Even with the 'normal' drivers, you could run the UT3 demo fine. It's when you have the PhysX levels that it slows down a lot.