AMD rolled out the next step of its Open Physics initiative today. AMD announced the Open Physics ecosystem has been expanded with free access to Pixelux Digital Molecular Matter (DMM), a new technology that has been tightly integrated with Bullet Physics. Starting a bit of a mud-fight AMD's Richard Huddy stated that most game developers only use NVIDIA's PhysX technology for the money they receive from the green GPU maker.
“They’re not doing it because they want it; they’re doing it because they’re paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn’t because the game developer wants it in there.”
In fact, Huddy reckons that no developers outside Epic genuinely wanted to implement GPU-accelerated PhysX in their game. “I’m not aware of any GPU-accelerated PhysX code which is there because the games developer wanted it with the exception of the Unreal stuff,” he says. “I don’t know of any games company that’s actually said ‘you know what, I really want GPU-accelerated PhysX, I’d like to tie myself to Nvidia and that sounds like a great plan.’”
Unsurprisingly, Huddy is very confident in AMD’s open approach to GPU-accelerated physics as an alternative, and thinks that it will eventually force PhysX to join GLide and A3D in the proprietary API museum.