Advice before buying a Ageia PhysX card

El_Cangri

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I know this has been posted in the Hardware forum but I wan't to tell to other users that don't see the Hardware Forum that this PPU is crap and is better to wait for another version more advanced and with it;s bugs fix.One of the problems of this card is that it lowers the FPS for example in a explosion you lose 10-20 FPS(this happened with one of my friends). But if you prefer losing FPS for eyecandy then waste your money in this PPU that looks like the company wanted to finish it so soon and throw it into the market.If Ageia don't fix this card it will lead them to their dead.

P.S If you have a extreme system well maybe you will not notice anything.Sorry for this comment but you will think that if you have a "old" GPU

EDITED by:
EL CANGRI DY
 

pswenne

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I think you are forgetin that the PhysX card is actually ADDING stuff for your graphic card to render. Which mean that if you don't have the GPU power to easily render all the new particule, effect, object.. etc, well you will see a drop in the FPS. Ageia never said that the card would augment the FPS.. it only allows for more detail physics.

The last time I checked the human eye couldn't see past 30FPS anyway.. so does it matter if you are at 40 instead of 60?

Everyone think that more FPS is better, yeah ok it's fluid, it doesn't lag.. but it doesn't mean 30 or 40 isn't good enough for your eye and it still doesn't lag.

I say buy it if you have really don't have anything else to upgrade but don't come complaining that you are loosing FPS if you have a medium/low-end computer...because it's not the PhysX card the problem.. it's the rest of you computer.
 

redspectacle

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If I remember correctly, the card doesn't render anything. It's not a graphics card. PhysX just removes the physics load from the gpu, which means more resources are freed to render additional polygons. As for the human eye thing, 30 fps isn't correct. The airforce conducts studies into the human eyes limits all the time; this is something important for pilots. In one study they sat a dozen or so guys in a dark room and flashed images of planes on a wall at irregular intervals for irregular amounts of time, (1/30 sec), 30 fps; (1/60 sec) 60 fps and so on. The average guy could see well past 200fps (an image on the wall for 1/200 of a sec) and even tell what kind of plane it was. Maybe the 30 fps became a standard due to broadcasting bandwidth problems, I'm not sure. What I do know is that the Ageia card is a step forward not sideways or even backwards.
 

Oberon

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Ah yes being able to see 1 picture for 1/200th of a sec is different than 200 different pictures in 1 second. It would be impossible for anyone even a pilot to tell what planes were shown if they viewed 200 different planes in a one sec burst. They might get the last one or even a few but not all. That is where the 30 fps in gaming comes in. When you get past this the eyes can take in the pictures but not be able to tell the difference between the pictures. And most all games are limited to 60 fps max unless you unlock this limit. I was in the AF and did participate in a few tests at Brooks AFB in Texas. Try this article.

http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm
 

pswenne

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I never said the PPU was rendering anything, I said the graphic card was. And you are right the PPU is freeing the physic load but not from the GPU since it never did physic.. it removes the load from the CPU. So the drop in frame rate is really understandable when you thing that the GPU still has the same load to render + the all the new particule added by the PPU. That means more work to do thus less FPS.

I'm a projectionist at a movie theater and all the projector run at 30 FPS because past a certain point an UNTRAINED eye can't "see" more frames.

For exemple: A couple of years ( like 15 if I remember well) Pepsi decided to make an add where every 30 frame a bottle of pepsi would appear on the screen for just 1 frame. After the add, people got so thirsty that they went to buy something to drink ( a bottle of pepsi for some reason). This is subliminal advertising ( which is illegal in this form) but it was very effective because the people didn't know that they saw the image ( must of us aren't plane pilot and we don't TRY to see the frames)
 

El_Cangri

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I didn't said that I wanted this card for more FPS and the card the Ageia was use on was a X1900XTX. I made this article because if the FPS went down in this card what will happen to people with "old" cards.As I wrote this was a ADVICE not a complain but I know that this is a good card.
 

GyRo567

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Aside from the fact that you have to be able to render the 10 million rocks rolling down the hillside and spliting apart before you can care about physically rendering them, I'm more disturbed by this:

People are talking about PPUs and GPUs, but they seem to forget we have nearly standardized dual core CPUs and our games are still singlethreaded...

Why not use the CPU's second core for physics? A fully dedicated future CPU core can more than handle advanced physics en masse when a tiny percentage of my ancient Athlon XP 2700+ Thoroughbred B can run the CellFactor demo lacking a PhysX card at a reasonable speed.
 

El_Cangri

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It would be a good idea but not recomended. The PPU is designed for taking off some workload off the CPU and the game soon will have more than one thread.The PPU was invented for calculating complex physics and the cpu would calculated but dedicating a complete core well I would not accept it because I would be losing a core for me if I buy a Dualcore I'm buying it for the 2 cores so if I one 2 cores I wouldn't like losing one. A PPU was designed for physics not the CPU It would be a great idea but not for me.
 

Wolfy

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So what do you want the other core to do in a game? Using one core to handle physics is an ideal solution over buying yet another add on card to take up another slot in my machine that I might have better use for. Or are you happy to buy an expensive dual core cpu and then buy an additional card?
 

llama_man

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The PPU was invented for calculating complex physics and the cpu would calculated but dedicating a complete core well I would not accept it because I would be losing a core for me if I buy a Dualcore I'm buying it for the 2 cores so if I one 2 cores I wouldn't like losing one.

I'm holding out for one of those Punctuation Processing Units. :wink:
 

Panzerzero

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I think the game and OS need to understand the card better honestly. Who want to do this process? CPU..No...GPU..No.PPU yeah I guess. All that takes time in ms which is FPS for us each from going to the PPU for advice on speed and direction and force/weight. Just funny what a waste of money right now. I don't feel bad for people who bought it a fool and his money are soon parted.
 

enforcerfx

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ya its good, i had 1, then i RMAed it, it didnt improve much graphic wise, i mean, i have 2 7900GTXs in SLi, and that shows good stuff, my advice, wait till more games come out for it *cough cough UT2007 cough cough* sorry im kind of sick. :D