AS i've said before Nvidia simply bought out Physx so they could attach concrete boots and let it lay with the fishes. Its cheaper for Nvidia to pay a little money now and let the whole idea die, than have to compete purely because someone else was doing it over the course of several years developement would have cost a lot more than it would to simply buy them out and dump the whole idea.
Everyone on earth with sense can see why hardware physics sucks, extra particles in an explosion moving perfectly are inperceptable to the human eye. When somethign explodes, say a bomb on the right hand side of the wall and the debrie blows left we have no inherent mathematical ability to judge where each piece should fall. THerefore a system based on estimates, which is easily easily easily doable on cpu as it is now, is more than fine, and a hardware based over accurate system will look identical to us as we could never physically know which is accurate based on just watching. To our eyes the wall will blow off in the right direction in both situations, and debrie will maybe be different, might even not be different, but the simple fact is anyone claiming they could tell which is real is lying.
Completely accurate physics calculations are 100% and completely not needed.
They pottsey will say, but look at the video, the video for the love of god look at the video of the cloth moving, how can you say thats not the best thing ever, in any game ever, that changes the way we'll play games forever. To which i'll say, get over yourself, its a piece of cloth. I'm shooting the guy behind the cloth, with a sniper rifle at 400 yards(to scale) and i can barely make out what he's wearing, i don't care if the cloth is rippling perfectly or not.
Then i'll also point out it CAN be done on cpu's it just hasn't. The wrote a demo to show how they can do cloth, which is in their code for their hardware and then they say a cpu can't do it. Sure it can't its code written for and optimised for the PPU, running code for a K10 phenom and running it on an itanium would give horrific results despite the itanium being incredibly fast, at CERTAIN things. IF someone could be bothered to spend half a year coming up with a demo to show how cloth can be done to look identical on the CPU either through full calculations or via a estimating physics engine using 1/10th of the power to do it could be done. But who wants to, Physx did it to show off their hardware, no one needs to show a cpu doing that as no ones going to buy a CPU based on some cloth demo which won't actually be used in game, as the demo is using shedloads of power to do one thing, which in a game it can't do unless the game is called "hanging washing on the line, the first truly PPU only title, excitement to the max" .
You can do all kinds of things in demo's turning full attention to one thing that simply aren't feasable in the real world. Thats why PPU's last game thing that came out the cloth in its own game looked significantly worse than in the demo because the cloth wasn't the only thing available. Its exactly the same as crysis adverts showing the very very very highest settings possible, probably rendered at 0.5fps but show in full speed and it looks simply stunning, but the game comes out, though the engine can cope with those settings hardware can't. PPU hardware can't do what it shows in demo's in real games, as it needs to do more than render one piece of cloth at a time, demo's are for showcasing best case scenario's which are so far removed from real world application that you can't base how good PPU is based on one tiny demo.
Everything Pottsey has ever said would be good in games from a physics standpoint are in games already to a lesser degree, it has nothing whatsoever to do with available gpu/cpu power, but everything to do with man power. every level thats fully destructable needs designers to program it to be fully destructable, its as completely simple as that. You could make a game right now where ever last piece of cloth, and wall, ceiling weapon, car, barrel, EVERYTHING is destructable, and everything blows up nicely and looks realistic, but that game would take 10 years and incredible man power to create and debug. SO ok, i guess theres a slim chance Duke Nukem Forever might infact do that as they have had that long
Hardware physics was dead from the start because it needlessly added complexity when it wasn't in any way needed. You can't tell real from estimated physics, you simply can't, its impossible we don't see the world in complex mathematical equations, we can't tell what is the right and wrong way for something to explode. Physics only dictates where the debrie will fly, not if the wall is destructable thats a pure and simply design choice and time requirement on if it can be done.
Its been suggested by many that the entire idea was to eventually (sooner rather than later) be bought out by a company if they can simply advertise well enough to make people think they need super realistic physics, on that level they succeeded perfectly, so at some point someone would buy them out to save developing a competing product. Physx won, they set out to achieve exactly what they have, they've made a killing(i would hope) and thats the end of it.
IF nvidia ever do port the API to be usable on their gpu's is questionable at best, a PR stunt at worst. Whose going to buy a second 8800gt for tiny increase in fps in 3 games, when they can buy a 2 8800 gt to give a 30-80% boost in fps in a damn site more games. no one, thats who.