Ageia PhysX processor review roundup

There's been plenty of hubbub surrounding the release of Ageia's dedicated PhysX "PPU" board, with Epic Games pledging extensive "Unreal Tournament 2007" support and around 20 titles in the works. Unfortunately, the launch support is pretty weak, and since the whole point of the tech is the gaming joy that it enables, there doesn't seem much point to get a card at this point. Just "Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter" is available with PhysX at launch, and the effects that are turned on in the game with the PhysX card enabled are not only not fully realized, but cause a decent hit to frame rates. Games built from the ground up to use the PhysX card, such as the forthcoming "Cell Factor" which claims to be the the first title to require the card, look quite good and frankly do things with physics that just aren't possible with the traditional CPU / GPU combo. With that said, major titles built in such a way around the PhysX hardware will be few and far between for a while, giving few reasons to spring for the $300 card until the kinks are worked out and the special effects it enables are more than tacked on -- if flashy -- extras. Anywho, for the curious here are a few reviews we found, anyone else got one? Leave it in comments and we'll tack it on.

Read - Hexus.net
Read - AnandTech
Read - Pc Perspective

[drew @ May 6th 2006 8:17AM]

"Unfortunately, the launch support is pretty week, and since the whole point of the tech is gaming joy it enables, there doesn't seem much point to get a card at this point."

I think you meant weak.

[Peter McCaffrey @ May 6th 2006 8:42AM]

yeah and...

and since the whole point of the tech is THE gaming joy THAT it enables,

-----
Peter
http://peteremcc.wordpress.com

[Intrepid @ May 6th 2006 9:08AM]

It's a pitty Microsoft didn't get to work on a 'Direct Physics' system. Then we could have had more cards and more games supporting these cards. Instead we have a '3DFX Glide' scenerio emerging!

[bob @ May 6th 2006 9:10AM]

2 things that advance technology - porn and games, so sad isnt it!

[Beanie @ May 6th 2006 9:31AM]

I think the fact that this is an extra card you have to be is so ass backwards. Hopefully, eventually the physics processor will be built into future vidcards or mobos, that would just make a lot more sense.

[fraxyl @ May 6th 2006 9:56AM]

I think it should be more supported by consumers, that way it will gather more support by developers. Why is it we expect massive support by developers before we accept something new?

Just think if nobody bought 3D accelerator cards when they were out in their infancy? We'd probably still be stuck with regular old graphics cards.

If these cards don't sell, why would graphics card manufacturers give their graphics cards physics functions? "People aren't buying, so they don't want them, so we don't need to spend money putting them into our products!"

[binary @ May 6th 2006 9:59AM]

They've got a nice idea... and the demos look great. But it's going to fail.

1. The cost is too high to allow for wide market distribution.

2. This will make most game manufactures not bother to pay their people extra time to add the code needed to support it.

3. This will prevent most people from buying the device.

4. Support will fall to the wayside, and they'll stop making them.

By then, we'll have Nvidia and ATI already building their own that work with all games... and some sort of activex control for it.

If they dropped the price to $30-$50 they would be able to develop a huge user base and leverage that against game companies - perhapse then license it back to them, they can recoup their development costs that way. But to try to cash in on the end users will prove their downfall.

[SuiXide @ May 6th 2006 11:08AM]

The only possible way this will work is if it's built in to video cards and/or motherboards. I personally don't want to spend another 300 bucks on a card for my PC that's going to be outdated in a year.

[paris @ May 6th 2006 1:38PM]

I remember reading that Nvidia has already started developing drivers that will utilise a second nVidia GPU (from SLI config) for physics. But all is not good as it will only be for eye candy and those physics won't be interactive ala physX.

So lets all support ageia as they are the only ones currently and in the foreseeable future offering hardware accelerated interactive physics.

[duke @ May 6th 2006 2:05PM]

innovation of adding this to current graphic cards to make 3d world better is sure good and pure. at $300 a piece, buttom line: can we live without it ?

Hell yeah.

[Octavus @ May 6th 2006 2:26PM]

The chief architect for ageia was a professor of mine, and he explained some of the differences between it, a video card and a general purpose cpu, and there are many. Video cards just can not do what it does efficiently. If I had the money, I would pick it up just for the future of the idea.

Also he happened to be a great prof, so if you can in the future take a class he teaches.

[Circle @ May 6th 2006 3:00PM]

Not all gamers have money pouring out of their pockets. Think on this when you try to sell us something that costs more than a mid-range graphics card.

30-50 bucks, what the heck are you guys talking about? Yeah, that's just foolish. Yeah last time I checked you don't just throw money away. Granted I can see the "sell the console at a loss make money on the games" idea but come on.

It would honestly be rather stupid for nVidia to use the second gpu for anything but rendering. First, the GPU is a very specialized processor, and hence is very good at what it does (pretty pictures) but not too great at other things. Second, Turn on all the eye candy in Obilivion. You need every ounce of rendering power you can get.

In short: Ageia, great idea. More launch support please! Hit in frame rates? (Maybe due to more little chunks of crud to render.) But with that price point even if there were a lot of games to support it I would still pass.

Now they want games that REQUIRE it? Yeah I don't see this happening/working out well.

[paul @ May 6th 2006 4:00PM]

I wouldnt spend your hard earned $299.99 on the PhysX card.Like paris said nVidia is currently developing parallel physics computing that will, in an SLI setup, dedicate one card to physics, and the other to gaphics. This will blow the PhysX card out of the water, and will be supporting virtually all games, where as the PhysX will support a select few (the only good one as of yet being IMHO UT2007). I can see the Physx card as not really making it in the real world, but I could be wrong, only time will tell.....

[Octavus @ May 6th 2006 4:07PM]

The thing that Nvida is doing is different, it will do the physics of none interacting objects, like papers blowing in the wind. It will not handle boxes and other interactable objects which the ageia card does.

[Revrant @ May 6th 2006 5:01PM]

Crap, paul, knock that dirt out of your head, read the comments before and now after you, it's not the same thing.

The thing I get from these reviews is it's currently a huge *hit* on performance instead of *improving* it and expanding the physics, this might be a hardware failing, we'll have to see, the thing that made 3D accelerators take off was what they were capable of, if this thing is proving to be a crippler instead of an improver, it won't go anywhere, banking on the end user or not.

[Yem @ May 6th 2006 7:10PM]

This seems kind of redundant. The trend is to multiple CPU cores - quad cores will be here soon. With developers already targetting Xbox 360 and PS3 (and rearchitecting for multiple processing threads in the process) I'd expect PC games to simply separate heavy processing into different threads so that another CPU core can handle it.

Why pay $300 for a proprietary dedicated card (and have developers expend effort to "support" it) when the average gaming PC already has two 3Ghz cores and will soon have four?

Besides which, it's pretty clear that any game which requires this card is dead and the card itself is dead if it causes ANY decrease in performance when enabled.

[Cybrid @ May 7th 2006 6:26AM]

I think the money range should be between 90-120$, but of course the best solution would be 'renting' the tech for the GPU manufacturers (NVidia & ATI) witch would insert it into their cards, or mounting it over a SLI system, making the second card to add a bit of more Graphics hp and the benefits of the phisics engine.

[duy @ May 7th 2006 7:40PM]

For gaming a PPU may not be practical yet. I see this more benificial for cg artists that work with dynamics/physics; this thing may cut down on render times tremendously or let people work complex sims in real time :D

[The Jeremy @ May 8th 2006 1:33PM]

I really wish Apple were gamer savvy and decided to throw this chip into the standard iMacs. Not only would it cement the physics chip as a standard, but it would also elevate gaming on the Mac platform to go along with the switch to the x86 architecture.

Although it is a very remote wish considering Apple won't even do what it takes to cement Firewire800 as an industry wide standard by putting the port on every Mac they sell.