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ASUS AGEIA PhysX Accelerator 128MB Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Monday, 08 May 2006 |
AnandTech published an exclusive review on the ASUS AGEIA PhysX Accelerator 128MB video card. A little over a year ago, we first heard about a company called AGEIA whose goal was to bring high quality physics processing power to the desktop. Today they have succeeded in their mission. For a short while, systems with the PhysX PPU have been shipping from Dell, Alienware, and Falcon Northwest. Soon, PhysX add-in cards will be available in retail channels. Today, the very first PhysX accelerated game has been released: Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, and to top off the excitement, ASUS has given us an exclusive look at their hardware.
 ASUS AGEIA PhysX Accelerator 128MB Review
We have put together a couple benchmarks designed to illustrate the impact of AGEIA's PhysX technology on game performance, and we will certainly comment heavily on our experience while playing the game. The potential benefits have been discussed quite a bit over the past year, but now we finally get a taste of what the first PhysX accelerated games can do. With NVIDIA and ATI starting to dip their toes into physics acceleration as well, knowing the playing field is very important for all parties involved. Will our exploration show enough added benefit for PhysX to be worth the investment?
If every game out right now supported some type of physics enhancement with a PPU under the hood, it would be easy to recommend it to anyone who wants higher image quality than the most expensive CPU and GPU can currently offer. For now, one or two games aren't going get a recommendation for spending the requisite $300, especially when we don't know the extent of what other developers are doing. For those with money to burn, it's certainly a great part to play with. Whether it actually becomes worth the price of admission will remain to be seen.
We are still an incredibly long way off from seeing games that require the PhysX PPU, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. With such easy access to the PhysX SDK for developers, there has got to be some pressure now for those one to two year timeframe products to get in as many beyond the cutting edge features as possible. Personally, I'm hoping the AGEIA PhysX hardware support will make it onto the list. If AGEIA is able to prove their worth on the console middleware side, we may end up seeing a PPU in Xbox and PlayStation down the line as well.
We're still a little skeptical about how much the PhysX card is actually doing that couldn't be done on a CPU. Hopefully this isn't the first physics decellerator, rather like the first 3D chip was more of a step sideways for 3D than a true enhancement. The promise of high quality physics acceleration is still there, but we can't say for certain at this point how much faster a PhysX card really makes things. With E3 on the horizon and more games coming out real soon, rest assured that we will have continuing coverage of AGEIA and the PhysX PPU.
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