On The Green Camp...

This week Nvidia has been on the news twice, for rather unusual(or should I say desperate) business practices:

• Batman: Arkham Asylum, a game part of "The way it's meant to be played" program from Nvidia, only let's you enable Anti Aliasing features on Nvidia cards.
• PhysX support has been disabled on systems that also have am AMD graphics card installed, to ensure you don't buy a cheap green card just for PhysX.

I'm appalled at the first move and Batman: AA's developers should also be embarrassed to be doing this. One thing is accepting money to optimize the game for said manufacturer's graphics card, while providing "unique" features like hardware PhysX support, but cutting out a feature that's general to every graphics card out there? That's been around for years? I'm at a loss of words.

On the other hand, the PhysX support getting disabled on systems with AMD cards was delivered close to the launch of Windows 7. This is no coincidence, as Win 7 differs from Vista by allowing the OS to support two graphics cards running two different drivers. This allows the use of a cheap Nvidia card for PhysX - which is enough for most stuff - and an AMD card to drive graphics.

It is a rather strange move for two reaons:

• Nvidia can probably make money from their cheaper cards but is - or will be soon - at a loss with bigger cards that can't even compete with AMD's offerings right now.
• Game developers will see hardware support with an even narrower view, when it should have at least widen a bit given Win7 support for two vendor drivers.

This move puts further constraints on a technology that's seeing difficult enough market adoption as it is right now. One year from now, when everyone has moved to other vendor agnostic physics middleware, Nvidia will have been left with a very expensive investment in PhysX and no one to support it.
If Nvidia wants to be so aggressive regarding PhysX, it should've at least waited for decent market adoption before pulling a move like this. While I don't agree with such move, it would at least have made some sence from a business standpoint.
Perhaps it has all went down the drain already and this is a desperate move to secure some retail sales before PhysX is finally put to sleep.