Test: AGEIAT PhysX by BFG

Summary

The undersigned has previously had the honor of testing products such as the AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+, nVidia 6800 Ultra and other such quality products.
However, this is the first time I've wanted to hang on to a test product slightly longer - or perhaps somehow make it disappear in the mail ;). AGEIA has been compared to 3dfx many times, and for a reason. 3dfx started an era with their Voodoo cards, and it was an experience without comparison to play games in 3dfx Glide. Whether this AGEIATs PhysX card is a sign of another era is too soon to say yet, but it clearly has the potential to evolve into something big. No matter what, physics will come to play a major part in future games, whether it is implemented using AGEIA PhysX, via Havok FX and GPU's/VPU's, or through DirectPhyscis from Microsoft. If you are to believe a comment from an ATi representative it will in the end depend on who of ATi or nVidia are the first to buy AGEIA and integrate the PPU on a graphics card.

Getting back to the PhysX card, it will be interesting to see if PhysX will really become as popular as AGEIA imagines. At present there are only a very few games to support PhysX, but with 100+ on the way, including Unreal Tournament 2007, the future looks bright for AGEIA.

Regarding performance, Hexus.net and Anandtech have both noted that you lose FPS in
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter by installing the PhysX card, but this does not impact the game experience. If that is acceptable is up for discussion, but it would of course be better if you could avoid the drop in FPS and still get the physics effects.
It could be interesting to see if a PCI-Express based PhysX card would help alleviate that problem, or if it is just the software which isn't completely mature yet.

We have chosen not to rate the card yet, as it is still too early to know what you should actually expect. Some people thinks that PhysX is a flop, and that software based physics, or physics handled by graphics cards is the future, while others claim that PhysX is the most important new invention since hardware accelerated 3D graphics.
Personally I think that PhysX deserves a top score - it is up there with the 3dfx Voodoo in ages past, although not exactly on par with it.

We will of course get back to this subject when the time is right.