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Ageia PhysX Accelerator cards

N

nib95

Senior member
Basically, I keep hearing about these Ageia PhysX Accelerator cards, but never really read much in to it, but now I see they have crept up in UK sites ready for pre-order but cost an astounding and ludicrous £200!!! My question is, are they even needed? How much do they improve physics, fps and performance, and are there any benchmarks on them?

Because I really dont want to fork out any more money on PC games, nor take up any more slots. Why cant GPU's just have the Ageia Physx chips embedded into them like with the RSX for the PS3?
 
No one knows, they haven't even been so much as previewed.

Since when does the RSX have an embedded physics chip? Maybe you are confusing visual physics (gfx effects that dont affect gameplay) with the physics ageia wants to implement (more collision type stuff, affects gameplay)
 
I'm pretty sure the RSX doesn't have the AGEIA physics chip built in, you really should do some more research, whoever spat that bull to you really needs to get their head examined.
 
ATI or Nvidia will probably sooner or later put a physics processor or something like that into their future cards. This reminds me of back in 1996/1997 when 3dfx's Voodoo 1 and 2 were top of the line and you had to have a seperate 2D and 3D card because the Voodoo 1 and 2 only had a 3D core and Nvidia came out with the Riva 128 which had a 2D and a 3D core. So this could turn out like that did sooner or later, where you don't need SLI or a separate Physics card, since history tends to repeat itself. It's probably not going to be needed until like 2 or 3 years later since the mainstream probably won't even have heard about the Physics card yet, and even if they do, it's going to take 2 or 3 years for the mainstream to finally accept the Idea of spending more for a Physics card if not longer. This is really like when the first graphics cards came out exactly 10 years ago, in 1996. It took until like 1998-1999 for them to finally get recognition when Nvidia released the TNT2 and Geforce cards.
 
Originally posted by: nib95
Basically, I keep hearing about these Ageia PhysX Accelerator cards, but never really read much in to it, but now I see they have crept up in UK sites ready for pre-order but cost an astounding and ludicrous £200!!! My question is, are they even needed? How much do they improve physics, fps and performance, and are there any benchmarks on them?

Because I really dont want to fork out any more money on PC games, nor take up any more slots. Why cant GPU's just have the Ageia Physx chips embedded into them like with the RSX for the PS3?
Click to expand...

The PS3 is likely to use the PhysX SDK but the actualy calculations will be done by the CELL CPU. You won't see an improvement in anything unless the software developers code the game with the SDK from the start or add it in later via patch/expansion.

As far as the price goes, that's the UK for ya, the government really sticks it to the customers with VAT & other taxes.
 
The PS3 does support PhysX according to Ageia. Remember, PhysX is an API not just a card. It can run in software and is multithreaded so fast vector hardware like the RSX can probably run it fairly well.
 
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