Introduction
Last week, we took a first look at the new PhysX add-in physics accelerator from AGEIA. After our article was published, AGEIA released an update to their driver that addresses some of the framerate issues in Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter. While our main focus this time around will be on BFG's retail part, we will explore the effectiveness of this patch and go a little further in-depth with the details behind our performance analysis.
In addition to the BFG retail PhysX card and Ghost Recon update, we will take a look at a few demos that require the PhysX card to run. While there aren't any games scheduled to come out in the near future that will take this new technology to the extreme, it will be nice to get a glimpse into the vision AGEIA has for the future. Getting there will certainly be a hard road to travel. Until more games come out that support the hardware, we certainly can't recommend PhysX to anyone but the wealthy enthusiasts who enjoy the novelty of hardware for hardware's sake. Even if PhysX significantly enhances the experience of a few games right now, it will be a tough sell to most users until there is either much wider software support, good games which require the hardware, or a killer app with a PhysX hardware accelerated feature that everyone wants to have.
As for games which will include PhysX hardware support, the only three out as of this week are Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (GRAW), Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (ROL) and City of Villains (COV). Rise of Legends came out last week, and we have been extensively testing it. Unfortunately, PhysX hardware support will only be added in an upcoming patch for which we have no real ETA.
We worked very hard to test City of Villains, and we finally succeeded in creating a repeatable benchmark. The specific content in City of Villains which supports the AGEIA PhysX PPU (physics processing unit) is a series of events called the Mayhem Missions. This is a very small subset of the game consisting of timed (15 minute) missions. Currently these missions are being added in Issue 7 which is still on the test server and is not ready for primetime. Full support for PhysX was included on the test server as of May 10th, so we have benchmarks and videos available.
Before we jump into the numbers, we are going to take a look at the BFG card itself. As this is a full retail part, we will give it a full retail workup: power, noise, drivers, and pricing will all be explored. Our investigations haven't turned up an on-chip or on-board thermistor, so we won't be reporting heat for this review. Our power draw numbers and the size of the heat sink lead us to believe that heat should not be a big issue for PhysX add-in boards.
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segagenesis - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
I feel so tempted to bring up the old cliche "The message is clear..." when you word it like that :)Really why is there not more "WTF" here? A better analogy to what you describe is the old "Hardware Decelerators" that say the S3 Virge was. And for $300? Damn, next thing we know they will be sub-licensing Patty-On-Patty technology from Burger King with a dual core physics processor for only $600! *groan*
They have the right idea here but this is some of the poorest execution possible in convincing people you need this product.
Magnadoodle - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
Calling this a physics decelerator seems just perfect. I wish anandtech would use some biting humour now and then. But that would mean degraded relations with Asus and BFG.Oh well, let's just get nostalgic about the days of unconstrained journalism and reread those old 6% Pcgamer reviews.
abhaxus - Friday, May 19, 2006 - link
When I got my original voodoo 1 card, the first thing I did was plug it in and run a few timedemos in GLquake... surprise surprise, it was actually a few FPS slower than I was running in software mode. Of course, I was running software mode at 320x240 and GL at 640x480 and the game looked incredible.I haven't seen a PhysX card in person but the trailers for cellfactor look very impressive. With PhysX being taken advantage of throughout the design and coding process I can't wait to see what the final results are for new games... of course, new drivers and a PCIe version will help too.
That said... I really think that this card will eventually turn out to be only for people that don't have a dual core CPU. Seems like most everything could be done by properly multithreading the physics calculations.
Nighteye2 - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
It's perfectly possible to remain be critical while remaining polite. Biting humour is unnecessarily degrading and does not add any value. Even 6% ratings can be given in perfectly polite wording.DerekWilson - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
We certainly aren't pulling punches, and we wouldn't do anything to preserve a relationship with any company. If we make someone angry, we've still got plenty of ways to get a hold of their product.I hope we were able to make it clear that CoV giving similar results to GRAW gave us pause about the value of PhysX when applied to games that just stick in some effects here and there. We also (I hope clearly) stressed that there isn't enough value in the product for consumers to justify a purchase at this time.
But we weren't overly hard on AGEIA as we could be for a couple reasons. First, CellFactor and HangarofDoom are pretty interesting demos. The performance of them and the possibilities presented by games like them indicate that PhysX could be more useful in the future (especially with its integration into UE3 and other game engines). Second, without more tools or games we just can't determine the actual potential of this hardware. Sure, right now developers aren't making practical use of the technology and it isn't worth its price tag. But it is very premature for us to stamp a "decelerator" label on it and close the case.
Maybe we will end up calling this thing a lemon, but we just need more hard data before we will do so.
Magnadoodle - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
Yes, I understand your point of view, and I don't think you're pulling any punches or being biaised. In fact, a biting review would be more biaised than anything. I was just remarking that this would have made a perfect occasion to have a bit of fun with AGEIA and drag them through the dredges. I nostalgically recalled the quite biting and humorous style PC Gamer put into their 6% reviews. PC Gamer never was a pantheon of game reviewing, but they didn't have to be nice to nobody (actually to "nobodies", because they had to be nice to big corporations). My point was more about the lack of wits and style in web publications these days than about anandtech being biaised. Not that anandtech has bad writers, just that it's more scientific than sarcastic.Anyway, good review Mr. Wilson and keep up the good work.
Seer - Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - link
Im also wondering about this claim that the driver update increased framerates. In all but two of the tests, the avg fps was either the same or a decrease. The largest increase was 1 fps, totally within the margin of error. (I'm talking about the GRAW tests). So, um, yeah, no increase there.