GRAW2's Ageia Island video

John Reynolds

Ecce homo
Veteran
http://www.planetphysx.com/weblog/

This makes me give serious consideration to spending the $150 for a PhysX board, especially since GRAW2 will be an instant addition to my benchmarking suite once it comes out next month. Will be interesting to see the frame rate differences with and without in the other levels of the title.
 
Neat, but that really had that one effect (can't remember name) where it was close to real but still away enough to make it look awkward. I'm curious to see games start to implement this level of physics and see the difference, though honestly I think its to late for the PhysX hardware to catch on and I can't say that really bothers me.
 
I rememebrer in the original graw it was slower with a physx card

The GRAW 2 demo that's out now is slower for those with these boards too. Just be interesting to see if the differences would be worth the performance gap. I really liked that tower's collapse when it was hit with a RPG.
 
Interesting video. It's been how many months (years yet?) since Ageia launched? I don't suppose anyone has insight on the plans for a second generation product being launched?

I know it hasn't caught on how the first-gen 3d cards caught on so it might seem silly for me to ask about the next revision of it. However, I recall reading that engineers at Ageia were rather disappointed and shocked with the performance of the current revision of the chip. I doubt many will be interested in the effects if it always entails a performance degredation. Can that be what's preventing a killer-application from being released?

If the price dropped to $100 and worked in Vista 64bit, I'd consider picking up a card.
 
Nice to see them support Vista 32 and 64bit and with a recent, May 10th, driver build too. NewEgg/ChiefValue has the BFG for $136+$7. You might be able to get the free t-shirt from ChiefValue too. It seems the prices have become more reasonable than the $300 set at launch.

Do all the boards have the same specs -- 128 Meg? I remember hearing about some models with more memory and a slightly faster chip. What ever happened with that?
 
The PPU can't use more than 128

At launch Asus said they would sell units with 256, I think they actually shipped a few. Ageia later stated there would be no use having a card with more than 128 ram as the chip could not make any use of it, I can't recall the exact wording but it would add nothing but $ to the cost. I tried looking for the article/interview but can't seem to find it. I think Ageia thought it would reflect badly on them if the 128 & 256 had the exact same results in benchmarks.

I think it sounds rather strange as I can think of a "few" reasons to why a physics card should be able to enjoy a larger memory bank :???:
 
I also recall there being talk of different models much like video cards, mainstream and enthusiast. It seems like they've collapsed down to one version. I think that will help their cause. I was a bit surprised to see a 4-pin molex connector on it and a gpu-esque heatsink/fan on it. I wonder how loud that is. Even more curious if there's any ability to overclock it. :LOL:

From what I was reading here and there, there may be some incompatabilities with some 680i motherboards. Not sure if it was/is BIOS issue or drivers. John, if you do decide to pick up the Ageia, keep us informed.

I'll likely wait until I complete my new build before adding more parts to it. I'm in process of leak-testing the watercooling blocks and attaching MC14 heatsinks to the GTX.
 
Do all the boards have the same specs -- 128 Meg? I remember hearing about some models with more memory and a slightly faster chip. What ever happened with that?

There was a 256mb version that Asus released but i believe thats been discontinued for awhile. They also did some speculating, talking about low to high end models, but that was if/when the cards took off as a general peice of PC hardware which hasnt happened.

Personally im not all too impressed by the video since its basically what we've been seeing out of the Crysis demo vids for the last year. With the impending launch of a quad core processor at around $250 from Intel i think there really is no good reason to have a physx card, or even for devs to bother with it for reasons long since stated. Off the top of my head i think Crysis and Alan Wake are two titles that will show that a large amount of physics done on CPUs is entirely feasible within a reasonable time frame.
 
Personally im not all too impressed by the video since its basically what we've been seeing out of the Crysis demo vids for the last year...

That's kinda how I felt. Even if one were to consider this physics demonstration to be superior to the demos from Alan Wake and Crysis (which is arguable), it's certainly not superior enough to carry the weight of an entirely new add-on board market.

Ageia faces a lot of problems that the 3D accelerator market never had, and as their product ages they continue to lose whatever performance advantage they had over CPUs.
 
I really liked that tower's collapse when it was hit with a RPG.

You like seeing wood shatter like it was glass ? Maybe a good showing for physics, but not for reality. Ironically, shooting "wood" in old games where nothing happened feels more realistic than what I just saw in that demo...
 
Honestly, every C2D CPU at at least 3GHz could do all this... One core for the game, second for the physics...
 
Yeah i think a Dual-core should be able to do that.
I still dont think I will buy it even if the video was pretty impresive.
Anyways to complain on the physics and say that it´s not realistic is almost like saying:
"I dont like the color on my Ferrari you just gave me, it shines to much";)
 
Honestly, every C2D CPU at at least 3GHz could do all this... One core for the game, second for the physics...
Uh? you have a C2D? i do, a x6800 even, and i dont get the cores to do that.. Heck a AMDx2 could too then, and i CAN get the cores on my 4400 to do different things, not so much the C2D.... conroe is a bit over blown... IMHO, being i have had it for almost a year.
 
Uh? you have a C2D? i do, a x6800 even, and i dont get the cores to do that.. Heck a AMDx2 could too then, and i CAN get the cores on my 4400 to do different things, not so much the C2D.... conroe is a bit over blown... IMHO, being i have had it for almost a year.

What? I'm not following you here? You can assign each core a different task using Task Manager by setting the affinity. But in a game you're not going to be able to tell which core to run what unless the game is designed for that. I think you're opinion on Conroe might be a little odd, I can't see how someone spending as much as you did on a processor feeling great about it either...

I also don't think the above effect would take much more than your typical A64 X2 or C2D though, saying "3Ghz" is really pointless and I don't think it would need that much power. As said earlier Alan Wake and Crysis have similar effect and Crysis at least is designed to run on a slower system than a 3Gz C2D.
 
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