AGEIA PhysX has been available for a couple of weeks now, the first with systems from Dell and Alienware, but it wasn’t until May that the first physics card was made available to consumers and that together with the first big game to support the technology. We have already seen some proof of what AGEIA PhysX can do with Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and even if there were considerable differences they were hardly revolutionizing. Now the first reviews of AGEIA’s PhysX physics processor have arrived where we also get to see some benchmarks and the results are perhaps not as impressive as one might’ve hoped. With only a few games available that acutally support PhysX it is still way too early to conclude anything, but the fact that AGEIA still needs a real “super-game” to market PhysX is pretty obvious.
GRAW has turned out not to be this game as it despite the support for PhysX doesn’t make much use of the power available. The benchmarks indicate that the CPU still gets to support a whole lot during physics acceleration and even if you get noticeably more effects the performance takes a serious hit with PhysX activated.
“Bet on Soldier employs much the same tactic, using the PPU to enable visual effects. The PPU does work intermittently, but the large amount of game physics is still done on the CPU in both BoS and GR:AW.”
Both Hexus and Anandtech has published shorter reviews/previews of AGEIA PhysX with both benchmarks and own commentaries.
