What is interesting to me in these discussions is how nVidia is often made to be evil *******s, when in reality if AMD bought PhysX instead they would probably act the same way.
Not to mention it has been what, 5 years since nVidia bought PhysX ?
In that time AMD could have introduced their own physics solution a long time ago, but they have absolutely nothing on that front, and what a shame that is.
I am playing Alice Madness Returns at the moment, and it has probably best use of PhysX next to Borderelands. Fantastic particle effects and black physically powered goo everywhere. Looks much better than normal version.
AMD didn't buy PhysX though so it's a moot point. nVidia has a track record of doing things like this with most things it has, AMD doesn't.
nVidia has a habit of trying to support things that only benefit themselves and lock you in to having to use their cards. PhysX, CUDA, 3D Vision and so on.
They used to do it with SLi, they wouldn't allow SLi on a motherboard that supported crossfire and would demand that manufacturers had to use one of their rubbish chip sets, claiming that SLi wasn't possible without the chip, just to make sure an AMD dual card setup wouldn't be work in it. nVidia personified is like a jealous bratty kid who takes a tantrum when they don't get their own way who likes to sabotage others it doesn't like out of some twisted jealousy. They're pathetic.
AMD has a track record of using and supporting open standards that will work on any brand graphics card and let the industry around it develop it.
Things like this should never be owned and developed by the company that's selling you the product, especially so. I don't think people really understand what they're talking about when they make suggestions like this. What benefit would it be to anyone for AMD to develop their own proprietary physics api that runs on the GPU?
No one because then you'd have AMD pushing theirs that doesn't work on nVidia and nVidia pushing PhysX that doesn't work on AMD. What developers would use and take either seriously when it cuts out half market?
So yeah AMD would be very different because they're not obsessed with proprietary software like nVidia are.
As for Alice, That's another thing that people don't get. The physics effects in it certainly don't require a GPU to process them. While they look nice, they are fairly basic, which leads back to what I was saying before. GPU PhysX is usually included at the expense of those who don't run it. So that cut down the effects so much if you turn PhysX off so that it looks rubbish to again add credibility and validation that your GPU doing the physics makes such a big difference. They actually do suggest or imply that those effects are only possible when running on the GPU.
and even that was fairly limited with mostly just tiles you could break and the odd corner that would realistically deform to damage. Thats always one of the big problems with widespread use of physics in the game geometry tho its a lot of effort to implement, requires a lot of foresight so that it doesn't have unintended game breaking consequences and really needs GPU compute to be able to use it widespread without a lot of artificial constraints that would be required for CPU physics - for example the broadphase filtering (narrowing down what objects actually need processing without having to process every single instance of an object) for a fully fleshed out level like Batman AA if it had full destruction physics, etc. would require around 70-80ms on the CPU so you'd never see above ~14fps at best whereas the same running on the GPU would only take ~6ms giving you atleast 160+fps to play with before processing anything else. (then the actual physics processing takes another chunk).
