Ageia PhysX isn’t

With the latest Nvidia drive to make people jump onboard the PhysX bandwagon, we did a quick and dirty test with the help of Nvidia’s own particle fluid demo. We actually have a PCI PhysX cards from the days of Ageia and we thought it’d be interesting to put it up against a Geforce card to see how both perform against each other.

There were a few unexpected surprises that we ran into; first of all we noticed that the Ageia solution was unable to render as many fluid particles as the Geforce option, which in this case was a Geforce 8800GT. In fact, it couldn’t even do half the amount of fluid particles that the Geforce 8800 GT card was able to do.

Now this might just have been down to faster hardware, but we noticed that the render was stuttering on the Ageia hardware and we couldn’t quite figure out why, as this wasn’t an issue when using the Geforce PhysX option in the drivers.

Running Fraps revealed that the Ageia card only managed about 15fps while the Geforce 8800GT was doing on average about 24fps. Again, we simply put this down to the Geforce solution being faster. Then we happened to glance over at the CPU usage widget in Windows Vista and noticed that there was a massive difference in CPU usage between the two.

The Ageia card only used between 30 to 40 percent of the CPU, taking into account that at idle at the desktop about 20 percent of the CPU is being used. Switching to the Geforce 8800GT the CPU usage jumped up to between 75 to 80 percent and at times even higher.

Even running the demo in pure software mode doesn’t use as much CPU as the Geforce PhysX option, although the demo is vastly slower using the software mode, which relies purely on the CPU. Oddly enough the software mode would produce the same amount of fluid particles as the Geforce card, no matter if the Geforce or Ageia option was ticked in the drivers.

This makes us wonder if Nvidia is playing fair and square, does the GPU actually do all the PhysiX calculations or are Nvidia offloading a whole bunch of calculations onto the CPU. Is this just a demo issue, or is there something more to this? At this moment we don’t have an explanation as to what is going on, but we’re sure that we’ve just stirred up yet another hornets’ nest.

Thanks man,nak speaking broken plak,tapi an,bler aku install driver 177.83 kalo tak silap,siap driver physx 8.08.18 diinstall,game grid aku takleh main,kuar meseg error window yang don't send 2.spec pc cam signature.

driver geforce yang korang cter 2 cnth ver 177.92 tue,driver beta ker?sebab kat website official nvidia tak release lagi pun.kalo driver beta,takpe ker pakai?tak effect performance ker?

Rasa macam nak tukar ke Nvidia pulak..Ati banyak masalah driver...haish..

uih ramai yang nak tukar ke ati ko plak yang nak tukar ke nvidia..

npe lak ko ckap cm2?ko pn nak 2kar ati?by the way thanks mnemonic,aku dah leh men grid kat rig aku.

nvidia 9500gt nieh bape harga?kalau main game the Sims 2 ok tak?

guna forceware berapa?

aku pakai 177.98,physx 8.08.18 kalo tak silap.
yang problem dulu aku pakai xp sp2,skang aku pakai vista sp1,
tapi gamba lebih kurang same jer kalo off atau on physx 2.

hmm dengar khabar-khabar angin forceware 177.98 whql ada problem.. betul ka? ada sesapa yang dah try forceware baru tu?

......

GTX350 specs leaked (mungkin)...

NVIDIA GTX 350
GT300 core
55nm technology
576mm
512bit
DDR5 2GB memory, doubled GTX280
480SP doubled GTX280
Grating operation units are 64 the same with GTX280
216G bandwidth
Default 830/2075/3360MHZ
Pixel filling 36.3G pixels/s
Texture filling 84.4Gpixels/s
Cannot support D10.1 .10.0/SM4.0 <---- yang ni tak paham.. diorang typo ke ataupun diorang guna DIRECTX 11???