Ex-Nvidia Executive: CUDA and PhysX Are Doomed

From X-bit Labs: Roy Taylor, a former high-ranking executive from Nvidia Corp. who now heads channel sales at Advanced Micro Devices, said in an interview that proprietary technologies like Nvidia's CUDA and PhysX were doomed. The industry has come a long way with open-standards GPU compute technologies and nowadays it makes no sense to continue pushing proprietary technologies in a bid to create unique experience.

"I think CUDA is doomed. Our industry does not like proprietary standards. PhysX is an utter failure because it is proprietary. Nobody wants it. You do not want it, I do not want it, gamers do not want it. Analysts do not want it. In the early days of our industry, you could get away with it and it worked. We have all had enough of it. They are unhealthy," said Mr. Taylor in an interview with VR-Zone web-site.

Mr. Taylor, who spent more than a decade at Nvidia and was instrumental in promoting numerous proprietary technologies, admits that early in the days of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU technologies) there was an urgent need for technologies that simply worked, no matter that they only worked on certain hardware. Nowadays, GPGPU is supported by industry-standard OpenCL and Microsoft’s DirectCompute, it makes no sense for developers to program anything on low-level for particular GPUs.

“Nvidia should be congratulated for its invention. As a trend, GPGPU is absolutely fantastic and fabulous. But that was then, this is now. Now, collectively our industry does not want a proprietary standard. That is why people are migrating to OpenCL,” said Mr. Taylor.

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