BFG Ageia PhysX Card Review @ techPowerUp

Iria · Oct 1, 2007, 05:15 PM

Review: techPowerUp
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While the adoption of GPUs has gone smoothly, as it did bring real and foremost simply implemented benefits, this is not the case with PPUs. The benefits are apparent when playing old games like Quake 1 on two identical systems with and without a dedicated 3D graphic card like the 3Dfx Voodoo. You had better effects with OpenGL back in the day, without a loss of overall performance. All you got were benefits, but no real draw backs. This is not as easy with PPUs as the physics calculations are done to a certain extent by the CPU. Physics computations are not an area which simply did not exist before the release of the Ageia PhysX PPU. The new processor can simply do them better, faster and also take the load off of a CPU, but the extra effects tend to tax the graphic card, thus reducing the overall frame rate delivered.

Oct 1, 2007, 05:15 PM	#1
Iria DriverHeaven Extreme Member Join Date: Apr 2004 Posts: 7,275 Rep Power: 74	BFG Ageia PhysX Card Review @ techPowerUp Review: techPowerUp __________ While the adoption of GPUs has gone smoothly, as it did bring real and foremost simply implemented benefits, this is not the case with PPUs. The benefits are apparent when playing old games like Quake 1 on two identical systems with and without a dedicated 3D graphic card like the 3Dfx Voodoo. You had better effects with OpenGL back in the day, without a loss of overall performance. All you got were benefits, but no real draw backs. This is not as easy with PPUs as the physics calculations are done to a certain extent by the CPU. Physics computations are not an area which simply did not exist before the release of the Ageia PhysX PPU. The new processor can simply do them better, faster and also take the load off of a CPU, but the extra effects tend to tax the graphic card, thus reducing the overall frame rate delivered.