Impressions from AGEIA PhysX PPU

The effects provided by PhysX processor are not very diverse yet, and in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter they are not even realistic enough. There are a lot of practically identical fragments that disappear after a while, which is far from what the real life situations would look like. Moreover, it even gives you that strange artificial feel from the action in the game. The CellFactor demo looks a much better from this prospective, however there is also a pretty big fly in the ointment: liquid effects are not just far from real, but also cause significant performance drops in corresponding scenes. Of course, the new PhysX API versions will acquire new effects. In particular, CellFactor already has support for cloth effects. The use of “cloth” type of objects will allow game developers to create naturally dressed characters and much more other things.

Let’s sum up a few things. The AGEIA PhysX physics co-processor does have the claimed features and can really increase the realism of the gaming environment.

However, since there are almost no games supporting PhysX out there, it doesn’t make much sense to invest money into a card based on this new processor, such as ASUS PhysX P1. For extra $299 you will get a chance to play Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter with a slightly higher level of realism in the game. The performance improvement in GRAW is not worth this money from our standpoint.

When new games with PPU support come out, the situation may change, however I wouldn’t recommend buying PhysX based cards in advance, because the current modifications use the PCI bus. New generation games using a lot of PPU resources may stumble over the insufficient bandwidth of the PCI interface in the first-generation PhysX cards. By the time there are enough games using AGEIA’s physics engine, they will most likely have a new revision of the physics accelerator using faster PCI Express bus. So, hold your horses and wait a little bit longer.