IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 05/10/2009

Third-party patch re-enables PhysX when AMD graphics board is present

Following NVIDIA's much-maligned decision to block users of AMD graphics boards from using a secondary NVIDIA GPU for PhysX processing under Windows 7 in their latest drivers, it was only going to be a matter of time before somebody out there came forth with an unofficial patch of some kind to re-enable this functionality, and so it has proved, as NGO HQ reports.

As expected, this move by Nvidia generated a lot of criticism from both consumers and even Nvidia's competitors. Luckily, a forum member by the name of GenL has released an experimental beta patch which intercepts disable-PhysX-if-Radeon-is-present-code. So far, according to user comments the patch delivers successful results. At this stage, the patch only works for PhysX GPU rendering and not PPU rendering. However, the developer claims that work is still in progress.

You can find this third-party patch for PhysX available to download from the NGO HQ forum in both x86 and x64 flavours, for use with NVIDIA's latest GeForce 191.03 driver.آ It appears that despite a few issues, people have been having success with using this patch to enable GPU-based PhysX on a secondary NVIDIA GPU paired with a primary AMD graphics board, although you do need to extend your Windows 7 desktop onto the NVIDIA card (even if you don't have any inputs plugged into it it's still possible to force this) before you can enable GPU PhysX processing.آ Of course, it goes without saying that this unofficial patch should only be used at your own risk.

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