Could PhysX Be Useless?

We took several runs of each test to come to the averaged frames per second results shown in the chart below. The raw scores were all within a frame or two of each other, with each card.

It is clear from the reported scores that there isn't much difference in the performance with and without the card. Of course this is better than having the scores with the card enabled lower than those with the card disabled, as was the case in the Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter results in the last article. But still, this is not good news for Ageia. The Shader Model 2.0 Radeon X850XT was obviously rendering the scenes using a lower code path, but the results were the same. No matter what card we put into that test platform, we came up with the same 2-3 frames per second difference.

Here is the large flag that is displayed in Release 35 when the PPU is enabled and effects physics are accelerated on the PPU.

Here is the same scene without the PPU and running in software mode.