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Ageia PhysX & You

Lost in arguing press releases and rhetoric spewed forth about Ageia's new PhysX PPU cards? We cut to the chase and tell you what you really need to know about PhysX and your money.

Review No – Editorial Yes

By now you have certainly seen some “reviews” of Ageia’s PhysX PPU (Physics Processor Unit) cards. I have been struggling a bit with how to present our opinions on this hardware, but I think I have come up with a succinct answer for our readers. Instead of saving this for a final page and paragraph, I am just going to tell you what you need to know now. If you are thinking of buying an Ageia PhysX card here soon, save your hard earned cash or invest it elsewhere in your system. As of today, the PhysX PPU is simply not going to deliver a gaming value worth the purchase price. Does this make it bad hardware? Hardly.

After spending some time with PhysX cards from both BFGTech and ASUS, I have come away unimpressed with the value it delivers to the gamer. (Also, just to be clear, the ASUS retail card is 128MB, not 256MB as previously stated.) The fact of the matter is that in order to experience what a PhysX card has to offer, you need a game that truly takes advantage of it. We discussed this in our previous PhysX editorial published in March. Our point back then was that in order for the PhysX card to be successful, PhysX was going to need a “killer app” to propel it forward into the gaming community as a must-have piece of hardware. After playing GRAW and Cell Factor for hours and hours over the last week, it has become painfully obvious that there is no reason for the gamer to own a PhysX card – yet. These are hardly the only two titles that you will ever see for PhysX hardware, but they are the only two that Ageia supplied to the press in order to show off PhysX’ talent. That being the case, I have to assume that these two are the best current titles to showcase PhysX.

GRAW

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is going to be the title that most of you are familiar with that “takes advantage” of PhysX hardware. I played a few hours with PhysX installed and working properly and a few hours without PhysX installed. You can check this page at Ageia’s website and see the difference that even Ageia themselves points out as “Full Immersion Physics.” In my hours of GRAW gaming, and keep in mind that I am looking for how PhysX impacts my gameplay, I can say that it simply did not make the game any better - or any worse. PhysX in GRAW just simply made no difference to my experience. In fact, all I really got out of PhysX was more shrapnel flying through the air when something exploded, but it did not make a difference in my gameplay or level of immersion. I might also suggest that the extra “particles” flying around and bobbing on the ground looked a bit cheesy and obvious last minute additions to the game. You could argue that PhysX negatively impacted my GRAW gameplay, but we will leave that argument for another day.

Above are two sequences of in-game screen captures that both show a transport being blown up by having a grenade lobbed under it. But don’t take my word for it. Let Ageia’s side-by-side GRAW footage leave you unimpressed.

Cell Factor

Cell Factor is a much different animal than GRAW. Whereas GRAW can be fully experienced with or without a PhysX card, Cell Factor requires one. Unless you have a PhysX card, you will not be playing the Cell Factor demo on your PC. Please take a moment to check out the in-game Cell Factor footage at the Ageia site, and then take a gander at what the members of our PPU forum are saying.

While PhysX GRAW simply gives you a bit more crap flying through the air, Cell Factor is a fully different ballgame. Cell Factor is impressive at best(even my 4 and 5 year old children were wowed by it), and utilized well by the gameplay at worst. In Cell Factor, you have Jedi-esque push and pull powers. You can pull in and control objects, and then throw them easily around the environment. A grenade into a storage area can yield and incredibly strong blast as it shreds barrels, crates, and other objects while throwing the shrapnel into the air. Get hit by that shrapnel and you are likely losing your head, left only to see your stub of a neck pumping gallons of “blood” onto the ground.

Along with the physics effects that impressed us we also saw terribly distorted character limbs during death sequences. There were some clipping issues as well. Objects were falling through the floors and hanging entrance dividers were clipping through walls. Now given how advanced these PhysX cards are supposed to be, I expected small issues that we have seen like this in games forever would be fixed. That said, Cell Factor is simply a demo and not a finished product so we will cut it some slack.

Once the wow-factor wears off, Cell Factor is a challenging game. Its use of HDR (High Dynamic Range lighting) can be overbearing sometimes and the explosion flashes are blinding and disorienting. There were many times when (even at 800x600) our frame rate started dipping into the 20s and teens which is simply not acceptable in what is a fast paced competitive deathmatch scenario. Cell Factor gets a B+ for showing what PhysX is about, but a D for gameplay. To me, Cell Factor did not currently represent a reason for buying a PhysX card.