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BFG's 128MB PhysX physics controller - Image courtesy Newegg
High end physics accelerators are no longer vapor

Several years in the making, us common folk will finally get a chance to buy one of the new AGEIA PhysX controller cards.  The card has been available for several weeks as part of Dell's Quad SLI system, and also as an option on many high end PCs like Voodoo.  However, since it was announced, no cards have made it into the channel with the exception of a few eBay specials.

Newegg has the BFG PhysX card (BFGRPHYSX128P) for sale at $299. The card features 128MB of onboard GDDR3 and a PCI interface.  Expect to see an ASUS version of the card with 256MB of GDDR3 within the coming weeks. 

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price
By AzureKevin on 5/9/2006 2:10:16 PM , Rating: 2
300 bucks for that is not justifiable at this moment in time. I would consider getting one if it will dramatically improve framerates (at least 10-20+ fps) in Unreal Tournament 2007 and other Unreal Engine 3 powered games. Otherwise, I'm just going to focus on saving up for a better video card.




RE: price
By vingamm on 5/9/2006 2:31:30 PM , Rating: 1
Ok I am pretty up on all things tech but what the H E double hockey stix does this do? I am guessing it is a PCI ad-on card for graphics acceleration? My question is why bother? if you pay $200 for a cheap (and I do mean cheap) GPU and then dump another $300 on this you have bought a high-end card that will probably blow the socks off this setup. maybe if we had some specs on it we could see a benefit but I don't right now.


RE: price
By AppaYipYip on 5/9/2006 2:40:43 PM , Rating: 2
It has NOTHING TO DO with a GPU. Think of this as a math co-processor to your GPU. It's a PHYSICS processor and will actually cause your system to perform anywhere from 5 to 13% worse when fully activated, since the CPU and GPU have to processor a higher number of objects. It only operates when used in conjunction with a game that utilizes the PhysX Ageia API and drivers. It allows for a MUCH higher number of particles, vectors, objects, etc. to be used to enhance the realism in a game.

It's a system DEcellerator at the moment and actually causes systems to perform worse. For now anyway.


RE: price
By aGreenAgent on 5/9/2006 2:52:34 PM , Rating: 2
I wouldn't call it a decellerator. Handling tons more object with a small performance penalty doesn't equal decellerator.

I guess you could call it a framerate decellerator, but it still boosts the power of the system substantially.


RE: price
By vingamm on 5/9/2006 2:57:25 PM , Rating: 2
um duh "physx". Had a brain fart there for a moment. So anyway, what you are saying is it's crap and I do not want one. Thanks for the explaination


RE: price
By AnnihilatorX on 5/9/2006 6:44:04 PM , Rating: 2
Anyway both of you "decellerator" is spelt as "decelerator" :P


RE: price
By aGreenAgent on 5/9/2006 10:32:36 PM , Rating: 2
/me blushes.


RE: price
By Plasmoid on 5/9/2006 3:09:42 PM , Rating: 2
No, it has nothing to do with a GPU, and i dont think he claimed anything of the sort. He did claim that the money he would potentially spend on one of these might be better spent on an improved graphics card but he never tried to say it was a graphics card booster or anything of the sort.

To say it alone will decrease yuor performance is nonsense. Sure in it's current implemenation by GRAW it will slow down gameplay, but you are not comparing like with like.

In theory, this will remove any CPU bottlenecks with physics calculations allowing the GPU to shine. In practice it has only been used to tack on extra graphics in GRAW, which unsuprisingly caused lower performance. It does allow much higher particile counts and more complex phsics but in addition to this it does physics calculations faster then CPU and can be used to process all phyics calculations if a program were coded to do so.

Until we get straight comparisons of a game fully running physics of one of these, and a game running fully off the cpu for phyics calculations, we wont know if they will be worth it in the future. And of course, until we get games that offload significant ammounts of physics calculations to the card it wont be worth it for all but the most exreme end of the market.


RE: price
By goku on 5/9/2006 11:45:07 PM , Rating: 2
It's causing a performance hit in some games because the developers were stupid and decided to use two different physics developer kits from different companies (Havok and Ageia). The ageia is used ONLY when adding special effects that require the physics processor but otherwise they combine both physics processors in the same scene causing performance slow down. The physics processor is really powerful but isn't being used properly, what they should have done is offloaded ALL physics processing to the physics processor but instead they just let it do some of the eye candy.


RE: price
By Aquila76 on 5/9/2006 2:41:03 PM , Rating: 2
Also, doesn't it FORCE the highest end physics particles, etc. on by default? I think AT's review of this card showed that installing this card actually hurt the framerate instead of helped it. It looked pretty, but turned it into a slideshow.


RE: price
By Wwhat on 5/9/2006 5:10:41 PM , Rating: 2
After which ageia said it had a bug and prmoptly put new drivers on their site.
Nice how you tell half the story, guess you are trained by the news media.


RE: price
By jtesoro on 5/9/2006 7:57:40 PM , Rating: 2
Guys, give it a chance. It's something like adding a new feature which has the potential to slow things down. Are we calling anti-aliasing or bump mapping decelerators?

"Hey guys, I got a new video card and I can play my games with 8x anti-aliasing!"

"What is it?"

"It's a decelerator."

Same thing here. Using it will give you some benefits (more particles behaving more realistically) at a price of potentially slower framerates or lower resolutions.


The sound of silence...
By segagenesis on 5/9/2006 2:25:56 PM , Rating: 2
... of those rushing out to buy this. One current title supported that gives lower performance for an extra $300, not a very good selling point. At the curse of being further labelled vapourware they really should have waited for better titles to show off its capabilities.

As an aside, where are those who were bitching at me a few months ago flaming me with "the PhysX will be $100 and not $300 you idiot!". Yeeeeaaaahh, I'm gonna have to ask you to come in on Saturday.




RE: The sound of silence...
By aGreenAgent on 5/9/2006 2:50:24 PM , Rating: 2
I talked to Ageia, and the target price for this card by Christmas is $100.


RE: The sound of silence...
By Plasmoid on 5/9/2006 3:21:39 PM , Rating: 2
It's worth noting that GRAW uses Havok physics, and has Aegia "physx" tacked on for those who own the card.

I really doubt future implementations will be that bad. Im sure UT2007 will use the Aegia API for all the game physics and will therefore get a proper boost with one of these cards.

Then again, maybe the Aegia API is horribly slow in cpu mode... what with being free and all. But these cards appear to be the real thing, capable of doing more physics calculations then a cpu can handle, and doing them faster.


RE: The sound of silence...
By aGreenAgent on 5/9/2006 3:34:17 PM , Rating: 2
It's worth noting that this is one of the first versions of the API. From what I've been able to tell, it's not slow, but I'm sure there's room for improvement.

I actually have crashed the drivers in my testing of the card - necessitating a reboot of the game.


RE: The sound of silence...
By dhei on 5/9/2006 6:39:17 PM , Rating: 2
I think most are just waiting for ATI and Nvidia to announce there on cards. Who wants to buy it on a seperate PCI card when its inevitable to be on the video card soon since ATI and nidia basicly said thats there intention soon.

Let me be the first say this company is next 3dfx..


RE: The sound of silence...
By aGreenAgent on 5/9/2006 10:35:13 PM , Rating: 2
Well - realize that any power used for physics at that point is power that could've been used on graphics.

The whole on-GPU physics processing is another marketing hype thing. If you talk to most video game developers, they'll still tell you that the bottleneck is the GPU, taking away GPU power just isn't in the cards for a lot of them.


RE: The sound of silence...
By AzureKevin on 5/9/2006 3:31:13 PM , Rating: 2
That sounds good; 100 is much more reasonable.


RE: The sound of silence...
By segagenesis on 5/9/2006 3:39:38 PM , Rating: 2
That I would buy. There is still the issue with games to resolve, however. The "test demos" they show are very impressive but that kind of stuff needs to be in playable games to make the product take off. I'm not doubting the capabilities of the card.


RE: The sound of silence...
By RMSistight on 5/9/2006 3:47:52 PM , Rating: 1
Yeah. $100 is definitely more reasonable...and plus it's not mainstream with games right now so there is no point to rush and get it.


RE: The sound of silence...
By Wwhat on 5/9/2006 5:11:37 PM , Rating: 2
liar liar pants on fire


Connector
By Crassus on 5/9/2006 2:25:34 PM , Rating: 2
ON the BFG website, this connector is listed as "32-bit PCI 2.3 (3.3v & 5v support)". From the picture supplied, I think the connector is too long for PCI 32 bit. Can anyone enlighten me as to the rest of that connector?




RE: Connector
By Plasmoid on 5/9/2006 3:17:35 PM , Rating: 2
It's a bog standard 32-bit PCI card alright, just with an extra notch on it.


RE: Connector
By AMDfreak on 5/9/2006 3:18:20 PM , Rating: 2
The key is "32-bit PCI 2.3 (3.3v & 5v support)". That is a regular length PCI connector. One of the notches is for 3.3V, the other notch is for 5v operation (I forget which is which). I believe most systems today have the 3.3V notching, but I have a server board that has the 5v.


RE: Connector
By Missing Ghost on 5/9/2006 8:12:11 PM , Rating: 2
No, the opposite. Desktops have the 5v, servers have the 5v and/or the 3.3v.


according to several benchmarks
By phil126 on 5/9/2006 2:40:45 PM , Rating: 2
From this benchmark
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2751
and a few other around the NET it will not add FPS to the games that can use it. Some are actaully worse due inpart to better physics. But currently you cannot control the physics levels on those games. With such a select few games that can use it and those do not seem to do much for me I can't justify it. I still want to see a game that would allow me to run the physics stuff in software (in a seperate thread) to see how close dual core can compete.




RE: according to several benchmarks
By Gentleman on 5/9/2006 4:07:15 PM , Rating: 2
I wonder if it is possible to offload some folding@home calculations to this processor while it isn't being used in a game.


By Plasmoid on 5/9/2006 8:36:28 PM , Rating: 2
Some kind of offloading of calculations for folding@home to ATI gpu's is being experimented right now. As far as i know the kind of hardware in those Physx cards and a Graphics card (at least ALU wise) is pretty similar, but Graphics cards are of course much more powerfull (and suitably more expensive)

Could be promising but f@h is notriously slow to implement new things, what with not being paid much and that.


High end physics accelerators......
By crystal clear on 5/10/2006 5:03:31 AM , Rating: 2
Contrary to all comments about the pro/cons of this card,this technology has a great future.One should note this technology is still in its early stages,with the cards out in the market as first version or a start of a series of improved versions of the card to be out in the distant future.
One will see the direct X technology combining with the above technology in the future.There is a possibility of combining this technology(not the card) in gaming machines.
The doors to this technology is not closed & wide open to applications in various forms in the course of time.
The hardcore gamers will try this card released,they do not look at the price rather performance is the motivating factor.Its obvious regular users will not consider the card essential for their computers as its not in their priority of their upgrade plan.
The target group is primarily the gamers of the younger age groups-they dont care,they are in a constant search to improve their gaming experience. The professional graphics user will also look at this card/technology to improve their performances.
I focus my attention more on this technology & less on the card released- give it a balanced approach.




RE: High end physics accelerators......
By nrb on 5/10/2006 7:03:23 AM , Rating: 2
I will not be buying one of these until they come out with a PCI-Express version.


By Tanclearas on 5/10/2006 8:48:56 AM , Rating: 2
Agreed. They initially only made it available to system vendors for new PC's which will have PCIe. The users that can most benefit from this type of card for the near future are those running CF/SLI, both of which require PCIe.

How did it make sense to anyone to make this a PCI card?!

The other thing I will wait for is a game that I actually want to play, and that uses the PPU in a meaningful way.

Honestly, I believe the PPU is a little early. It can already be seen that CPU scaling is almost non-existent at high resolutions (even starting as low as 1280) because the video cards can't handle what's going on. Adding a PPU will only put more strain on the GPU. I'm all for cool effects, but I think we might still be a year or two away from having GPU's that can actually handle the load.


7800GT / 2x6800
By rqle on 5/9/2006 4:34:54 PM , Rating: 2
I think i rather have another 7800 or even a 2x6800 over this thing. But for you guys that can do 2x7800/7900 already, then price is probably a mute point for you (lucky bastard).




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