Archive for the ‘PhysX Hardware’ Category
Ageia PPU in current PhysX reality
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 GTX275 CO-OP PhysX edition announced
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
| Core Clock Speed | 633+738MHz |
| Processing Cores | 240+128 |
| Memory Clock Speed | 2268+2200MHz |
| Memory Bandwidth | 127.0+52.8GB/sec |
| Shader Clock Speed | 1296+1836MHz |
| Bus | PCI-E 2.0 |
| Interface | DVI-I, DVI-I |
Recommended price is 349$.
Update: some pictures from Launch Event
Source: EVGA
ATI + PhysX ban: even Ageia PPUs are affected ?
Following Geeks3D report on that recent driver update disables PhysX hardware acceleration not only for Nvidia GPUs, but for Ageia PPUs as well (if non-Nvidia graphics card is present in the system) we’ve desided to perform small investigation.
Test methodology is simple enough: we’ll use certain sample from PhysX SDK 2.8.1 Build 13 to identify if Ageia PPU is working and initializing properly with different PhysX drivers on several systems with Nvidia and ATI GPUs.
Used PhysX System Software – 8.09.04 (last one with direct PPU support) and newest 9.09.0814 installed above 8.09.04 (PPU won’t be recognised on pure 9.09.0814 drivers)
GeForce System #1 – GTX275 + Ageia PPU
PhysX driver 8.09.04 PhysX driver 9.09.0814
GeForce System #2 – GTX295 + Ageia PPU (thanks to JeGX from Geeks3d)
PhysX driver 9.09.0814
As you can see, in both cases Ageia PPU was recognised properly by the system, and hardware acceleration is working too (test applications indicates that both scene and cloth simulations are running in hardware)
What will happen if we’ll try same scenario, but now with ATI GPU installed in the system ?
