PhysX Driver for 8800 cards and up is here!

http://www.nvidia.com/content/forc [...] wnload.asp

Driver plus the UT3 mod, and 7 or 8 physics demos!

Wonder what kind of effect this will have on performance, I can't see higher FPS when the video card has even more work to do.

You have 3870x2, what know you about performance?

Fairly good job of showing the diff.

http://www.guru3d.com/article/physx-by-nvidia-review/
http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/15261

Still a performance impact but supposedly worthwhile improvement in physics effects. Definitely did not like the TR video footage, the plasma rifle getting all that junk around it sucked in by a shot, not any more realistic than without it. Seemed to still lag in figuring out what to do with the effect.

It's a nice stepping stone, but a long way to go with such large debris objects.

i was not impressed with the badaboom player, the options were very limited and it took 35 minutes to convert a dvd where it normally takes me about 25.

as for performance i went from a maximum of 139fps with a 82fps average to a max of 60fps and an average of 41fps with the physics turned on. however the game is still very playable and it looks a whole lot better, more things are destructible, there are particles of debris flying everywhere and the gravity wave canon is a nice addition.

i posted a comparison video on youtube and there are lots of other ones on there too.

cant wait for them to make some more maps for it.

I played around with the demos last night. I'm happy with the free PhysX capability, but the effects aren't totally mind-blowing. I just don't see many developers spending the extra time and money adding PhysX into games right now, especially when ATI cards can't use PhysX, yet.

It seems to me that this is just a fad - quickly multicore processors will take care of that, dont you think? It seems like a waste of GPU power to me

Only when you're not using just one GPU.

The best application of GPU physics is when you take a card you otherwise would've discarded and turn it into your physics engine.

Running PhysX on even a GTX280 IMO is a bad Idea, however adding an old GF8600GT to your GTX260 to give you better physics and let your GTX260 dedicate itself to just your graphics makes alot of sense IMO.

The only 2 things bad about PhysX is that it's being used as a barganing chip instead of an open API or controlled by a 3rd party. I'd trust Microsoft with the API over any of the 3 major hardware makers. And the other issue is that even for the titles that support it, it's a tack on glossy ting and not the underlying physics engine. Flak and bullets still drop and bounce in the usual predetermined CPU path based on the underlying Epic and Havoc physics engines that actually power UT3 and GRAW.

My understanding is that any 8 series card with 256MB RAM or more can run Physx.

Yeah, but it's still very limited and very artificial. If PhysX were the underlying engine, then you could hope for changes in bullet drops, and alot more than what essentially is bejewlling the experience. Oooh Shiny rhinestones.

Until it becomes the core of a game, and it makes enough of a difference other than making it feel like every game is played in a hurricane surrounded by brittle construction materials, it's not quite what most of us were hoping for 4-5 years ago when these discussions started during the early Brook GPU days.

If the game isn't using the PhysX engine in software mode before, then there's going to be no increase due to the PhysX driver.

thats a trash card, a waste for your money. buy a 9500gt (crippled by todays standards) instead of a 9400gt(uber crippled).