Page 9
The verdict
Difficult! I have very mixed feelings as I feel sorry for the ones who spent 300 bucks on this card as currently it's just not worth it. It's not that the card can't bring another dimension of that gaming experience onto your screen, but the games simply do not support it (yet). The one title we have that ran Physics properly was GRAW, yet this game is meant for pure realism. So despite you'll get some more gaming rig bragging rights you'll have to face one fact .. the developers only slightly integrated Physx advantages into a handful of games. Some more particles during explosions but all in all .. it's very little. We also tried the Bet On Soldier Demo, the game has Physics PPU support with a patch, the demo however did not, at least not that we could spot.
But I must state this again: The PhysX PPU has nothing to do with your graphics cards other than it'll give it more stuff to render. Please think of this as a math co-processor next to your GPU. It's a physics processor and it will actually cause your system (in most cases) to perform slightly worse when fully utilized, since the CPU and GPU have to process a higher number of geometric objects. A game that utilizes the PhysX Ageia API and drivers allows for a much higher number of particles, vectors, objects, etc. to be used to enhance the realism in a game and that's where the joy is to be found. I'm sure games like UT2007 will use the API for a large chunk of the game physics and will therefore get a proper boost with one of these cards, the boost that Ageia really deserves.
Although not mentioned in the review we also had a peek at overall power consumption. With the PPU enabled in Graw we detected an increase of roughly 25 Watts on the overall power consumption. In a time where we see videocards suck up 120 Watts I presume that's an okay number.
Right now, the Ageia PhysX card is still where we were months ago ... but make no mistake .. this technology has a great future ahead of itself. Ageia is a pioneer as they weere the ones that launched the world's first PPU, the physics processing unit and that counts for a lot.
So in the end it boils down to this: Currently the 250-300 bucks you have to cough up for this card is too much considering the number of games that utilize this technology, once the industry has successfully embraced, adapted and integrated Physics technology into their games then that's the point where things will change. That'll also be the moment we give this product another review. Guru3D believes that Physics acceleration technology really deserves a place in our PCs. I assume it'll be Christmas 2006 before we can see a good number of games supported.
Meanwhile ATI, NVIDIA and even the development of AMD's and Intels Quad-core processors (which could do Physics on one core) is not sitting still. Give it the time it needs as the technology is extremely interesting and WILL enhance our gameplay experience, that's a guarantee.
Many thanks to BFG for supplying this review sample.
Oh and I just noticed that the card as delivered today by BFG is merely 207 USD already.
To be continued ...
