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[alcorn6281]

I have an a10-6790K and use a r9 280x graphics, I realise that due to this recent graphics card upgrade that the graphics cores are disabled due to incompatibility with the r9 280x, though I am hoping that it will be compatible with the next range of APU'S.

I was reading about the whole NVidia PhysX aspect and would like to throw a concept out to AMD developers, AMD cannot use the PhysX due to royalties which is fair game and as a result the CPU cores try to handle PhysX requests, but would it be possible for AMD to enable the graphics cores even with a dedicated graphics card to computational calculations etc. to take some of the grunt work for applications and games away from the main CPU cores.  I am limited on my knowledge but I would assume that being able to utilise the disabled graphics cores for computational calculations would improve overall performance.

I can imagine that this might be questioned over patching for PhysX processing but I'm referring to AMD providing some driver or update that would enable the graphics cores to be active and the software to put any computational calculations through them that would benefit various applications such as CAD.  Currently the APU handles PhysX requests but if the graphics cores are utilised to handle computational calculations then they would deal with any requests leaving the CPU cores to other tasks.

[cgrant78]

Though sincere, your wish is a significant undertaking. You are mixing 2 different concepts here PhysX is a system application and drivers are a whole different beast. Its job of application developers to write application to take advantage of the HW provided by the likes of AMD or Nvidia or whatnot. I would be very surprised if there is anything inherent ( apart from those forced by design choice ) in PhysX that would prevent it using OpenCL for GPU simulation.

"I can imagine that this might be questioned over patching for PhysX processing but I'm referring to AMD providing some driver or update that would enable the graphics cores to be active and the software to put any computational calculations through them that would benefit various applications such as CAD.  Currently the APU handles PhysX requests but if the graphics cores are utilised to handle computational calculations then they would deal with any requests leaving the CPU cores to other tasks."

Its called OpenCL, AMP, or whatever name heterogeneous multiprocessing fall under these days. The responsibility falls on the application developer ( NOT AMD ) to take advantage of processing resources.