Advanced Micro Devices said that Nvidia Corp. had specifically altered its PhysX application programming interface (API) so that it could not take advantage of multi-core central processing units (CPUs) while making physics effects computations. According to AMD, the reason for such modifications was to increase importance of graphics processing units (GPUs) that are used to process physics effects in select games that are powered by PhysX.
“The other thing is that all these CPU cores we have are under-utilised and I'm going to take another pop at Nvidia here. When they bought Ageia, they had a fairly respectable multi-core implementation of PhysX. If you look at it now it basically runs predominantly on one, or at most, two cores. […] I wonder why Nvidia has done that?
