Protecting your investments is a good idea in business as well as in your personal life, which was what likely prompted nVIDIA to have their latest graphics card driver disable PhysX in a system with non-nVIDIA cards in it.  A sub-set of those gamers who do use PhsyX utilize an AMD card for their graphics with an nVIDIA card to handle the PhysX processing but apparently using the 186 driver version will disable GPU PhsyX processing.  PhysX has not had much success penetrating the market, those few games that utilize it do not really gain any benefits from PhsyX apart from a few visual changes which most of the gaming market are not willing to invest in a second GPU to experience. 

Also consider the pending release of the MSI Big Bang motherboard that will have the Lucid HYDRA chip on it.   That will allow you to use any two to four GPUs in tandem, be they AMD or nVIDIA and with scaling that looks to be much superior to CrossfireX or HybridSLI.  Perhaps the poster at NGOHQ who notified us of this issue is not over reacting when proclaiming that nVIDIA has shot its self in the foot.

“Well for all those who have used Nvidia cards for PhysX and ATI cards to render graphics in Windows 7… All that is about to change.

Since the release of 186 graphics drivers Nvidia has decided to disable PhysX anytime a Non-Nvidia GPU is even present in the same PC. Nvidia again has shot themselves in the foot here and showed they are not customer oriented. Since they are pushing Physx this will not win over any ATI fanboys with this latest decision.”

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