NVIDIA has has published a nice video, that is showcasing technical demo called “Glowball”, running on their next quad-core mobile chip known as “Project Kal-EL” or Tegra 3, presumably.

Glowball demo features some complex (for a mobile device) real-time dynamic lighting and shadowing effects, and decent level of PhysX based physics calculations – rigid body barrels and drapes, fully simulated as cloth obejcts.

Cloth simulation is partically interesting: scene contains 10 drapes, likely 100-150 vertices each, affected by gravity and board movement, calculated simultaneously – new kind of physics effects for mobile devices. This tech can be used not necessarily for flags or banners, but for dynamic clothing on characters, for example.

Demo was running on PhysX SDK 2.8.4.5.

Update: More physical demos on Tegra 3 platform

Mobile devices are interesting environment for PhysX SDK to evolve and adapt, so we are eager to see how things will play out in this direction.

Linus Tech Tips website has performed several benchmarks to find out if low-end dedicated PhysX cards are still valuable in systems with high-end graphics cards, using Mafia 2 benchmark.

8600 GTS GPU is clearly bottlenecking the whole system, resulting in lower fps than even a GTX 580, despite the fact that if single NVIDIA GPU is used in Mafia II, PhysX effects are partially running on CPU.

In conclusion, in case if you want to pair a dedicated PhysX card with GTX 580-class GPU, find a decent one – GTX 550 or “even something a little bit lower-end”, as author of this video recommends.

Owners of original Ageia PhysX cards are not in love these days – PPUs are not only not recognized by PhysX SDK 2.8.3/8.4, but even not supported by more or less recent PhysX System Software.

However, our reader Andrew “MohawkADE” Elliott has discovered a way (through drivers mixing, registry editing and some alchemy) to re-enable PPU support even with newest PhysX Drivers.

In this case you’re be able to kept your PPU in the system, benifit from hardware acceleration in PPU PhysX games and, potentially, in CPU PhysX titles, or even pair your PPU with dedicated Nvidia GPU.

Head over to our forums for further instructions.

Marvelous informational video was uploaded today by our regular reader – Andrew Elliott (also known as elliottad or MohawkADE). It is related to overview of Ageia PPU card history and it’s place in current hardware accelerated PhysX infrastructure.

Also, you can find full transcript at our forums.

If you own an Ageia PhysX card, planning to buy one, or just interested in PhysX lifecycle – this video is worth watching without doubt

It seems that TweakTown loves testing monstrous (and thus redundant for regular user) PhysX configurations. Previously it was HD 5970 + GTX 480, and now – GTX 480 for graphics along with GTX 465 working as dedicated PhysX card.

Update: and yet another article from TweakTown – GTX 480 vs GTX 470 + GTX 260 in PhysX games.

Read the full article.

Performance numbers are great, but GTX 465 does not seems to be a good candidate for such role because of heat, noise and high power consumption. I’m personally waiting for low-end Fermi based GPUs, to reinforce my new GTX 470

Well, NDA for new GTX480/470 GPUs from Nvidia is lifting now all over the world, and we are ready to spoil some details about PhysX computing capabilities of new GPUs.

Not bad, huh ? GTX 480 promises 2.5x performance gain over GTX 285 in PhysX calculations. To reinforce this statement, some benchmarking results vere revealed.

First one – for Raging Rapid Ride techno-demo, featuring complex water simulation (you can read our overview here).

Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you know that so called Hybrid PhysX setups (using ATI GPU for graphics and Nvidia GPU for PhysX – in one system) are officially banned by Nvidia. Unofficially – available through GenL PhysX mod. However, all this hacking and patching isn’t appropriate for certain users, not to mention that Nvidia can find a way to block Hybrids completely one day.

New Lucid Hydra, technology that can split graphics rendering even between  ATI and Nvidia GPUs in Multi-GPU setups, was rumored as compromising solution for Hybrid PhysX problem. (can’t say we believed in that).

Unfortunatelly, recent tests of MSI Big Bang Fuzion, first motherboard with Hydra Engine inside, have shown finally – No. It’s not working this way.

According to Big Bang Fuzion review by GURU 3D

What if you want to enjoy PhysX in X-mode? – well you can’t, as the minute the NVIDIA driver sees an ATI card, it will disable it.

Read the rest of this entry »

EXPreview.com website has published detailed pics of EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX – card with exceptional design, which combines two different GPU,  G200 (GTX 275) and G92 (GTS 250), on one PCB.

55nm GT200b graphics-rendering chip (left one on a pic below) operates at a 633MHz core, 1296MHz shaders and has 896MB of GDDR3 memory, running at 2268MHz. 55nm G92b chip (right one), fully dedicated to PhysX processing,  runs at a 738MHz core, 1836MHz shaders, and has 384MB of 2200MHz GDDR3 memory.

Cooling system consist of two heatsinks with heatpipes, fan in the middle.

Source: EXPreview.com

Question “How Ageia PhysX PPU can handle newest GPU PhysX titles ?” is still interesting for some people, ATI owners for example. NinjaLane has published PhysX Performance Tests – The way games should be played article, that includes benchmarks of old Ageia PhysX PPU card along with Nvidia GPUs.

While PPU is still good at Unreal Tournament 3 and Mirror’s Edge, it has insufficient power to run latest titles like Batman Arkham Asylum with smooth framerate.

You can read rest of the article here

EVGA GTX 275 CO-OP PhysX edition graphics solution was announced recently. As predicted, mysterious card turns out to be GTX 275 dedicated for graphics and GTS 250 dedicated for PhysX on single PCB.

Technical Specifications

Recommended price is 349$.

Update: some pictures from Launch Event

Source: EVGA