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ASUS AGEIA PhysX P1 Physics Accelerator Review |
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Written by Mavke
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Saturday, 22 July 2006 |
PC Perspective comes with a review on the ASUS AGEIA PhysX P1 Physics Accelerator video card. It has been more than two full months since we first looked at a retail AGEAI PhysX card, namely the BFG PhysX PPU Acceleratir card. We have been discussing and analyzing the prospects of a dedicated physics processor for PC gaming since AGEIA's first announcement of it before E3 last year. Besides BFG, ASUS is the other AGEIA partner that is offering these cards in the retail and e-tail markets. Both cards are just about identical, so the differences are going to be mostly cosmetic.
 ASUS AGEIA PhysX P1 Physics Accelerator Review
The business plan for AGEIA was to seed their software physics API, initially called Novodex but later renamed to PhysX, for free. Appealing to many developers for the low price, the PhysX engine has made its way into several game engines such as Unreal Engine 3, due out later this year. While developers can use the software API to run the physics in the software, the API also allows the developer to use the PhysX hardware to create even more complex interactions. By giving away the engine and promoting it to developers, AGEIA is trying to create a software base that will lend itself well to PPU hardware sales.
While the name for this concept might seem a bit grandiose, the ideas behind it are very logical and put some good ideological weight behind the PhysX chip. AGEIA promotes that by adding a PPU into the mix with the CPU and GPU. They are essentially increasing the power that both other components effectively have and also pushes them beyond their limits. Since the PPU would take a large majority of the physics work off the CPU, the processor would be less bogged down and thus could address more cycles to feeding the GPU with data to crunch and keeping the game state in order.
The ASUS card is still using the PCI bus, not the newer PCI Express bus, as AGEIA still states the bandwidth and latency are appropriate over it for their physics computation models. About 128MB of GDDR3 memory is attached to a 128-bit memory bus to store all the physical information required for AGEIA's PPU to function. The PhysX P1 card looks like a standard PCI add-in graphics card with a small heatsink and fan attached and a 4-pin power connection on the rear of the card. Additionally, the ASUS Physx P1 Accelerator requires the use of a 4-pin power connection.
The ASUS PhysX P1 Accelerator card is the best option available for dedicated hardware physics powered by AGEIA. If the platform itself were more exciting or the outlook for upcoming PhysX titles was more appealing, I might be able to recommend that gamers buy one up while stock is plentiful. Unfortunately, that is not the case, and as such its hard to get excited about a $250 upgrade that isn't doing much.
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