Installation:
Installation of the card is pretty painless - find a free PCI slot, mount the card and boot the computer. Windows then informs you that some new hardware has been found and asks for drivers. The BFG CD includes an older version of the AGEIAT SystemSoftware, which can also be downloaded from their homepage. I chose to do so in order to get the newest version.
The first dialog box during the installation phase looks the following - and you just hit next, next, next and finish to complete the installation. The only noticeable difference is a short menu in the Start Menu and a small AGEIA icon in the tray.
If you click the tray icon or select "PhysX Processor Settings" in the Start menu a little window opens, where you can find some documentation, update drivers or see the version numbers of the currently installed drivers.
The Settings tab is surprisingly bare - you can actually only perform a software reset of the card or enable/disable the tray icon. Finally you can run a diagnostics test of the card, which for me didn't find any problems.
On the Demo tab you can launch a small physics demo, where you can knock over some blocks by shooting a ball at them by hitting the space bar. A small video showing this can be found here:
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Settings%20Demo.wmv
Techdemos
I am sorry for the use of differing codecs for the videos (DivX, XviD & WMW), but FRAPS cannot claim to be good at compressing recorded videos, and yours truly hasn't had much luck with that either. Hence I've used whatever codec gave the best quality/compression ratio for each demo.
I have chosen to record some tech demos from one of the AGEIA development tools, Rocket, and a collection of various readily available demos. Rocket can also be used on systems not equipped with PhysX cards and can be downloaded from the AGEIA homepage, along with some other demos. Do note that a few of these demos requires a PhysX card. Rocket was not made for PhysX hardware acceleration, and so far AGEIA has not updated it, meaning that these demos a limited by other bottlenecks in the system. The same is true for the other demos. There is another version of Rocket made by Novodex, which was the company AGEIA got Rocket from, and that version has some other options and demos available. However, I have used the AGEIA version, as it has adjustable demos.
Raycast demo: 
A demonstration of how various physical objects can block things such as rays of light.
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Raycast.avi
FluidCreate demo: 
A demonstration of how realistically water can be simulated. Requires a PhysX card.
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Fluid.avi
Car demo: 
A fun little demo where you can drive an assortment of cars and the relevant physics for that. Somewhat unrealistic, however - you don't see trucks with trailers doing wheelies every day. :e.
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Car.avi
Transforms demo: 
A little tutorial demo showing some of the functionality in the PhysX API, such as gravity and "center of gravity".
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Transforms.avi
AI sensor demo: 
A demonstration of collisions between static and dynamic objects.
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/AISensor.avi
Rocket: 
Rocket has a lot of different features and demos you can play around with. It's actually a fun piece of software you can spend quite a lot time using.
I have to chosen to record a video of a few small but impressive things it can do.
http://www.hwt.dk/images/litt2/download/Physx/Rocket.avi
As written above I chose the AGEIA version of Rocket in order to be able to adjust some of the demos myself. With that in mind, you could start thinking about which options are available in driving and flight simulators by the use of PhysX.
I feel very tempted to claim that PhysX will have a serious impact on those kinds of games of when you look at the amount of settings available.
Enough tech demos - let's see if it can be used in some real games!
