AGEIA hasn’t exactly been able to lean back and enjoy the ride with its new physics accelerator PhysX. The first tests we reported about all complained over crippled performance and relatively few physical effects, a poor equation that doesn’t really improve when you see the price of AGEIA’s expansion card that is being sold by ASUS and BFG. AGEIA was quick to release a new driver for its PPU that would solve the performance issues that was revealed, or at least improve the performance significantly. At Anandtech they’ve published an updated review of PhysX with AGEIA’s new driver.
Unfortunately, not much have happened since the last tests and there still seems to be a big bottleneck with AGEIA’s implementation of its PPU. If this is related to the drivers, hardware or perhaps the PCI bus is hard to say though. There is a lot of potential with AGEIA’s PhysX concept, but we seem to be pretty far from a solution worth $300 today.
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