First there were sound cards, then there were graphics cards, now physics cards??
By gavomatic57 on 19 July 2007
Anyone who haunts the nerd forums will have heard of PhysX and the sheer and unrestrained indifference it caused a year or so ago. Well a year or so on and the curiousity beat the hell out of me and I had to see what it could do, so I bought one.
PhysX is a physics engine by a company called Ageia, who are hoping to take on the mighty Havok physics engine that has found its way into some of the classic games of recent times, such as Half Life 2 and F.E.A.R. to name but a few. Havok is a software only program that uses the CPU to calculate the physical properties and behaviours of objects, whereas PhysX is able to offload to (surprise surprise) a PhysX card. This is a PCI card that looks suspiciously like a graphics card but lacking the DVI ports on the backplate. It has a fan like a graphics card and a molex connector to supply a bit more juice than the PCI port can give it. The specs of the BFG card I bought are as follows:
Processor: AGEIA PhysX
Memory Interface: 128-bit GDDR3
Memory Capacity: 128MB
Peak Instruction Bandwidth: 20 Billion/sec
Sphere-Sphere Collisions: 530 Million/sec max
Convex-Convex (Complex Collisions): 533,000/sec max
That's a level of processing power that some graphics cards would be proud of, but this is just for calculating physics!
The rub...
When the PhysX card came out it didn't exactly set the world alight. The main reasons for this were numerous unfortunately - it was very expensive for something you didn't really need, there weren't many games that made use of it and the games that did weren't exactly classics. There was also a tech demo released along with it called Cell Factor. Now, whilst this was free it was supposed to NEED a Physx card, but someone soon discovered that it would work fine if you just added a flag to the shortcut, albeit with some decent effects missing.
Without a physics card your CPU will be responsible for controlling the behaviour of objects on screen, whether it be fluid, cloth, bits of wall being blown off by firearm rounds, balls bouncing, tanks exploding or anything else that moves in great numbers or at great speed. A physx card will lighten the load on the CPU and enable it to concentrate on more pressing issues, such as character AI and whatever else a CPU needs to be doing at any given time.
The perfectly simulated dust seems to have settled a bit now and developers are starting to see some of the benefits - did I mention that the PhysX software is free for developers to use, providing they support the physx hardware?? Developers have to pay to license Havok for their games. There are some cracking games on the horizon that will use some of PhysX's untapped power such as Warmonger and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 which has just been released features an extra level that requires a physx card to unlock. Warmonger will feature fully destructable environments that actually stay broken once you've looked away (yes, I'm looking at you F.E.A.R.!) and it is rumoured to be a free download on release. The Unreal3 engine (Unreal Tournament 3, Gears of War) is also using PhysX extensively. This summer will bring some genuine killer applications that will use PhysX and the price of the card has come right down, so it may not be such a bad idea to get one.
There are unfortunately vultures circling in the form of quad-core CPU's and Nvidia's Quantum physics engine that will make use of hardware on their Geforce 8800 graphics cards, but like any competition or format war, there will probably be a mixture of all three for a while. If you really like PC gaming, it may be wise to keep those bases covered.
The games that support PhysX hardware can be found here
The card can also be bought from here:
So far, the games that I've played that use PhysX add a few extra graphical touches but they don't affect the gameplay in any way, other than giving your graphics card a little more work. They do help to make the game world that little bit more believable though. The games in the pipeline that I've mentioned will hopefully open a few more eyes.
Ageia have provided Vista drivers for both 32bit and 64bit editions. Cell Factor Revolution is a free download and will give you a taste of what can be achieved with a physx card. The BFG PhysX card I bought came with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and there are plenty of free demo's to be found on the internet to give your new card a workout.
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