Review + video: Potentially gaming biggest leap forward in years, the Ageia PhysX card can deliver miracles in 3D.
The first Ageia PhysX physics accelerator cards in Australia are in our hands, and naturally, we are putting them through their paces. We are all dreading the day we have to let this completed piece of engineering wizardry leave the labs. It is a piece of history, like the first graphics accelerators.In issue 66 of Atomic magazine we are featuring a major benchtest and analysis of just what the Ageia PhysX card is capable of. Look for that issue onsale Wednesday 14th of June. Here on the Atomic site we've put together a primer and video review for this potentially breakthrough piece of technology.In the beginningIn the past, the focus of much of the hardware industry’s time and effort has gone into making game world’s graphics look amazing. Now though, an additional layer of specialization is upon us, and things are starting to feel a little different. We are looking down the business end of the Ageia PhysX card, which has been designed to ramp up the complexity with which in-game objects move, break into pieces, break further into shrapnel, get buffeted around the map and increase the presence of objects around you in the virtual world.
Physics acceleration is not new, but this dedicated hardware method is. Ageia has built a card that, when coupled with a game that is written to take advantage of it, can siphon off the tasks of calculating motion away from the processor and deal with them in tandem with the rest of the components in your PC. Like 3DFX's Glide, this has the potential to revolutionize the gaming experience - by breaking down the duties involved in making a game and assigning them to different function specific parts of your PC. All this means greater detail, but not as we know it.
To get PhysX going you actually install two sets of drivers, one of which is identifies the card to Windows. The other functions as a set of API revisions, known as engines. Multiple engines can be installed so that a PhysX coded game can use the revision that most effectively addresses the PhysX card. We have not been able to test this further at this stage.
The driver panel that is loaded into the control panel and the system tray is reminiscent of a dxdiag.exe screen, with fewer options. There are no tweaking features, yet, as the functionality and reliability of the device is the most important factor in these early stages of development. Other than diagnostics, there is a demo utility that displays boxes being hit with a ball, causing them to fly everywhere. It is underwhelming, functional and reminiscent of a Linux system's OpenGL test, glxgears.
We received an Asus PhysX card, the technical demo, known as Cell Factor: Combat Training; the New Ghost Recon and Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends. We fired up the demo first, wanting to see the exaggerated examples of the cards abilities. Needless to say, we were running maximum detail, with HDR, motion blur, full AA and 1920*1600 resolution.
Firing up the PhysX card in the test benches, an FX-60 with 2GB of RAM and Crossfire’d X1900s and the same again with SLI'd 7900GTXs, yielded expected results - some issues. The Nvidia rig required no driver updates but played through the demo. It was choppy until we wound the detail levels back. We ran into driver incompatibilities on our ATI based system, but after rolling them back from the latest 6.4 Catalyst series to the 6.2 series, it played the Cell Factor demo so well that it became our reference system. This comes down to the fact that the ATI cards have 48 pixel shaders each, and the 7900GTX cards have 24 each. There are more pixels to be rendered on screen at any instant when Cell Factor uses the PhysX processor to hurl objects and bits of objects logically into space.cont.
The Atomic PhysX videos
Direct from the Atomic labs, showing off the capabilities of the Ageia PhysX card with commentary by David Field and Craig Simms.
SmallWMV 18.75MbLargeOgg Vorbis 56.46Mb
Issue: 133 | February, 2012