Neowin.net

thats 200 quid.. more like $375

No, it's not worth it. Ageia is going to go down in flames once Nvidia (and ATI will follow) starts releasing GPU's with physics accelleration support built-in for free, or at a low cost. This PhysX card is a blatant ripoff for gamers. I could see some 3D animators buying it however.

Another problem with their plan is that developers will not make games that depend on this card. This means the physics are going to be superfluous eyecandy with no real influence on gameplay. They may allow some games to run faster, but for $200? Hell no. You can get SLI cards for the same benefit. Look how many people buy those, and whether or not those are essential for gaming.

I believe it is safe to say that Ageia isn't going to be around too long.

Yeah, the cards can do it, but they will slow down graphics, and wont be as fast as this card can be anyway (and wont support the same amount of objects)

It's sorta like running graphics in software mode, yeah the CPU can do it, but a dedicated card can do a lot more, and do it faster.

havok and nvidia showed it can be done as well and it's very impressive. they used sli so that one card is doing the physics and the other is doing the rendering. this would still be an expensive alternative but people who already have sli would be able to take advantage of it. however, running physics on the gpu and on the cpu is very different. physics calculations and graphics calculations share one big thing in common. they both use linear algebra and vector math. a cpu however does not have native support for vector math (among some other things such as highly optomized texture lookups) and is why "software mode" graphics rendering is so slow. using the gpu which *does* have native support for vector math and the programmability to write complex simulations allows physics to be modeled on the graphics card. the aigea physics card, as stated by aigea, is a a really fast processor with optomized vector math support. they said this at quakecon 2005 at a stage event. another advantage to gpu physics modeling is that the objects that are being modeled, are being transformed, rotated, and lit by the gpu already which means the data is already flowing in that direction. in the havok demo, they even said that the cpu does not know anything about the orientation and location of the objects being physically simulated. i really hope havok takes this past their concept demos and this becomes big. very exciting stuff.

This card has nothing to do with Graphics though, you can bring a top of the line computer (with SLI, etc.) to it's knees by adding a lot of physics objects to a scene, this card allows a lot more (e.g. bits of a car if it blows up, not just large chunks.)

I know it has nothing to do with graphics hence its name. What I meant to say is that games are not that complex today that we'd need dedicated hardware to handle the physics part. The CPUs can handle that part without noticeable bottlnecks. I mean on an Athlon FX you wouldn't even see a difference if compared to this PhysX card

i would disagree. read my above post on vector math processing. the physX card does show improvements when very large amounts of collisions are taking place. however i still stand by gpu physics processing with sli becuase sli can be used for other things where as a physics card (right now) can only be used for physics and their sdk.

I don't know of any gamer that said "let the CPU do all the work." Maybe some of the PC business users said that. I remember everyone scrambling to buy them to play Quake and all the 3D games that were popping up. You couldn't play those games without them. You don't need this Ageia card to play the latest games. See the difference?

Ah, but you will need PhysX cards sooner or later. It's only a matter of time.

Oh god don't remind me...