Introduction

I look at the GTX 465 and see a real opportunity for NVIDIA to do something big; giving people the chance to use this card as a PhsyX card in ATI based systems would be a simply fantastic idea.

If you haven't heard already, the 257.15 Beta ForceWare driver set from NVIDIA accidently had the ability for ATI users to again use an NVIDIA card as a second to do PhysX. The whole ordeal created a bit of drama around the web; as soon as it was discovered by NVIDIA they yanked the driver and put another one up that disabled the ability.

After a bit of uproar, they put it back up but said that it wouldn't be included in future drivers; they kind of dribbled on about how it's expensive to maintain it for ATI cards. It sounds like a load of crap to be honest, because it's been disabled for ages. We're sure in the last few months they've done nothing and all of a sudden it was slipped in and working fine on ATI cards. I don't know what NVIDIA have against making money, but the whole thing sounds stupid.

Still, it's not my job to tell NVIDIA what to do. Instead I'm going to show you what you can do with the current Beta driver. We've tested a couple of high end ATI cards with a number of NVIDIA ones. Let's have a quick look at how we got it working before we get into the benchmarks themselves.