False alarm from Nvidia turns happy geeks into sad chucks.

Earlier on this week, the Nvidia Forceware 257.15 beta driver was released, and many had rejoiced, and celebrated, as the GPU/PPU-accelerated PhysX can now finally work on non-Nvidia GPUs. Many though that Nvidia has finally let the issue go and market their lower end cards as PhysX cards too.

However, when the wind got wild, Nvidia quickly announce that this was not a feature in the new released beta driver, but a bug instead. That restriction rule was not implemented in that particular driver, and the WHQL version of the driver will have that rule enforced into it. New downloads from Nvidia’s site will also have that rule re-enforced.

“Yes, this is a bug in the latest build of PhysX that was packaged with the driver. We’ll be fixing this issue ASAP – the WHQL driver launching in early June won’t have this issue. –NVIDIA”

For those who are lost here, here’s a quick brief of what’s going on. Starting with the Forceware 186 series NVIDIA blocked GPU/PPU-accelerated PhysX from working on NVIDIA GPUs and AGEIA PPUs whenever a non-NVIDIA GPU was detected as being in the system. It’s been a polarizing matter for the GPU community for nearly a year now, with a tug-of-war going on between projects editing the drivers to remove the block, and NVIDIA adding further checks in to their drivers to stop those efforts. In any case, there has been no sign that NVIDIA would be changing their position any time soon.

[via Anandtech]