BFG Technology AGEIA PHYSX card

Haven't seen any benchies yet bu I am eagerly awaiting them. Kudos to those who find em

That's what I am wondering as well. It definately sounds very interesting. I hope it offers more real world performance than SLI. I have heard rumors of it costing around $250.00. Which if the performance is right might make it a worth while investment.

I would say this new physics card is going to improve the rigs performance. Okay, in a pc with no physics card the physics that is mainly scripted are run by the cpu obiously. But with the addition of the physics card, now the cpu would no longer have the task of running the physics on the game for the physics card takes it over, well most of it. So the performance will definitety increase in a pc sporting a graphics card. Bottom line, 3 chips (cpu,gpu & ppu) working together is better than just the cpu and the graphics card.

As Agiea have mention, the card supports some games that are already out but would not fully implement it. Games like Cellfactor and others alike that are soon due would fully soppurt this physics card.

I mainly play BF2 and FEAR most of the time and I wonder how this new card can improve the game performance. I'm very interested with these physics card, but I not so sure if I want to buy right after it comes out, which is this coming May. Since none of my games that fully supports this card I would say I just gonna wait like the end of this year for games that supports this card and by then the price would be cheaper than $300.

does anyone see the pattern here come on, it's going back to old days of computers

a card for everything

the more the better the computer performs

i am not complaining, personally i think it's cool

Even though Nvidia is making a physics driver there are a couple things that make me cautious. The first thing is that you have to have dual cards to make use of it. The second thing is that it still is putting tax on the GPUs instead of the CPU. It seems to me that a card dedicated to physics is just the ticket.

i understand that gpu is calculating visual;
but nvidia is claiming that one gpu will be doing physics calculation dedicated.
although, that's if they make the driver correctly...
so.. basically, nvidia will make a gpu card to an physics card by a driver update...
i wonder if it is possible though...
maybe it will perform great... maybe not...
we'll just have to wait and see....
btw... BFG physx card will be released in end of may to end-users, according to BFG.

i aint going to try to refute what your saying chuckshissle, but i really don't think your can comprehend the processing power of GPU's. a CPU and GPU are different but both ATI and nvidia are trying to allow physics on their chips. all the agiea chip will do is use the right calculations to simulate physics. the GPU's of today have more than enough power to accomplish this. they just have to be communicated with right.

i believe ATI have went further by allowing developers some access to the details of their chip so they can program physics in games. if developers know how to program physics so it will be done by the GPU then there is to my knowledge no reason for it not to work.

edit:just found this and thought it might interest people. http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=226&type=expert&pid=1

even though the gfx card may be as good or better at it :?

Its like saying when the first GPU card is out, the CPU is better at prosessing Graphics than the GPU, LOL.

How many time do I need to post this......
Ok, here goes, 1st the GPU Physics is only for visual, looks only, no interactive content, you cannot interact with it. 2nd GPUs are more of a kind of "Inline" or we call "The Production Line" in car factories, NOTHING goes BACKWARDS, but the CPU does, the PPU does even more.

More overly, games running the Agiea PhyX ppu, ragdoll DO NOT dissapear, other stuff wont too, see the video of CellFactor? Damn alsome, you will need the card to run the game, the video is recorded in real time. The Havocs GPU physics only calculates cloth simulation, some ragdoll effects, and particle effects, not too interactive ehh?

Why would anyone do SLI Physics? I would rather, have SLI and PPU with a Dual/Quad core CPU, GPUs are design for Graphics, CPU for prosessing data and stuff, PPU for physic, face the future guys and girls, we moved to GFX cards, it time to move to a PPU card too, anyway it wont cost much, consider it would actually last for like atleast 2 years.

Physics datas are RANDOM, GPU aren't design to do RANDOM data prossesing, CPUs are good at random codes but aren't optimized to run dedicatedly for Physics right? thats when the PPU comes in.

Conclusion: CPU are for data xfer, GFX for Graphics, Sound card for Sound and PPU for Physics. Just like in a American foot ball team, you can't have team with all the same people, just like in chess. you can have all the chess pieces the same, you would lose very easily.

Anyway, the PPU is the only thing that can do SUPA interactive inviro, imagine, you wana frag a guy hiding in a building, you can just blow up the buildings pillars, or you can blow OFF the ROOF and shoot the guy!!!!! LOL.

Just wait for SLI Agiea Phyx!!!!! LOL

It does make you question how many new cards will we be craming into our future gaming rigs? With things like quad SLI graphics and PPUs where does it stop?

If you add in the giant power supply needed and you have a heat factory. I think it shows that water cooling will be mandatory pretty soon.

I understand your dedication to the free part of the driver Nvidia is doing. But you get what you pay for. GFX cards may have a lot of power but that doesn't mean they are capable of taking on all of that crap. Have you seen some of the benchmarks, some of the frame rates from the latest games with the graphics full enabled. Even the new 7900's in SLI barely run the intensive games with a decent frame rate. So you suggest taxing them with more physics operations as well? Nah, I'll let a dedicated chip handle the physics and let my gfx cards stay cooler while handling what they are meant to handle.

You seem a little biased here, don´t you? It doesn´t matter if you have a nvidia or ati board, you won´t get the same level of physics processing like a dedicated processor. It is hardware optimized for physics like a gpu is for graphics....

And expect to see many, many game bugs on gpu physics processing...if graphics drivers do have a lot of bugs, imagine what we can expect for driver to run physics on gpus....

Dude, would take to long to compile all the stuff on the ppu, but if you want to know more, you can visit both ATI's and Ageia's homepages and get the white papers on their architecture.
If you want to get into more technical stuff just mp me and we can discuss it.

watch they come out with a card for the monitor

ohh wait ...
8O

i won't be PM'ing you as there is nothing to discuss. i went on ageia's website and read 2 of their white papers and tbh if you think they could be used in any constructive argument you are an idiot. they were full of their own buzzwords, and only told how their way was the only way. i know all manufacturers do this, but they are a joke. they provided no actual information and numbers and told me nothing more than the article's i've read. i will wait for more detailed information and see the real story.

Hey, no need to get aggressive, but if you do I can certainly answer accordingly.

you know what you are an idiot. if you bothered to read my response properly to cisco, you would see i was going by HIS logic. he mentioned the Gflops in realtion to processor speed. that was not an indication of my opinion.

thats some impressive results tabris

I would rather have a physics card, rather then drive the physics through a GPU (regardless of manufacturer). A GPU is designed to render graphics for games. It is true that the architecture has become a lot more general and flexible in allowing certain programming to be executed on the GPU, but it was not designed specifically to handle something like physics calculation. If I bought and created an SLI system, I would want a faster frame rate through graphics processing. If one card is used for physics calculation, does this mean that the graphical frame rate drops?

My theory concerning this is that indeed the graphics card would be successful at calculating physics; however, what would happen if you wanted to run the game at a high resolution with all the eye candy turned on? I imagine you would still have all the interactivity and proper physics calculation, but the game would not see much frame rate improvement because the graphics card would become a bottleneck.

I think mainly the benefit would be in terms of the game play, not in terms of frame rate. And with GPU rendered physics, you would have to trade game play for frame rate. With a dedicated card, you can have both, with an SLI setup dedicated to rendering frames, and a physics card contributing to the element of game play.

Looks like I'm right, Havok FX is only limited to EYE CANDY ONLY, buy Ageia PhyX if you want gameplay, like me.

Draw back is the games you play, since I love and play Unreal Engine titles, I'm in luck.

I don't know if anyone mentioned this but Ars had an interesting article explaining both the Ageia physics card and how the Nvidia solution differ...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/po [...] -6436.html

If you read the article you'll see the Ageia card and NVidia's solution are ment to work together and complement each other. Not so much competing as complementary.

/begins clapping, slowly standing .... claps faster

I lifted this from an article on another web site

"Concerning the recent news on NVIDIA’s Physics use on a GPU using Havoc, we spoke with Epic Games’ Mark Rein at the recent GDC conference and he told us “I can use every bit of GPU you can give me” – why use any precious GPU cycles for anything but graphical rendering? Ever thought about what sort of GPU power it’ll take to drive some of the larger LCD’s coming out? "

http://www.gdhardware.com/hardware [...] pp/001.htm <-- the whole article.
I tend to agree with that part there why use the graphics card for physics if I can buy another card to do it... I know it would be cheaper to do it with a video card driver but if im running SLI im not realy worried about whats cheaper LOL

Point taken about ATI, and I did read the article you posted. However the article I posted compares how the addin physics card differs in functionality from a graphics card doing physics. It seems a logical approach to allow the graphics card to handle the physics involved in rendering graphical effects (smoke and fog come to mind) and allowing a dedicated ppu to handle structural effects, like a grenade hitting a building causing an in game effect.

IMHO, the right tool for the right job.