ED#95 : NVIDIA Launches PhysX!

[Mac Daddy]

Originally Posted by DarKSeeD

Depends, it will be interesting to see how it performs. I still have an Ageia card from Asus and you bet I will do a lot of tests.

And you bet we will be looking forward to the results

[g0tanks]

Originally Posted by Mac Daddy

And you bet we will be looking forward to the results

Yep. Will NVIDIA continue to make drivers for the PhysX card?

[Mac Daddy]

Originally Posted by g0tanks

Yep. Will NVIDIA continue to make drivers for the PhysX card?

Good question I have held off submitting questions to Derek til Monday have some other things going on. Want me to include this in the interview ?

[DarKSeeD]

Originally Posted by g0tanks

Yep. Will NVIDIA continue to make drivers for the PhysX card?

They stated somewhere on their site that the support will still be available for PhysX card owners. But I think they will cease that pretty soon because I don't think PhysX GPU will be backward compatible with old titles like GRAW - GRAW2...but also I could be wrong. Time 2 sleep...

[Adrian Wong]

Guys.. FYI, NVIDIA had trouble with the original driver. They have since uploaded the improved driver.

Some of you had trouble with the 177.39 driver not installing. We've fixed the issue and uploaded the new version.

Please note: you need to install the PhysX driver in order to get the full performance out of 3DMark Vantage. Without the PhysX driver, 3DMark Vanage will use CPU physics.

Also, this is actually just a driver that allows PhysX to be accelerated by the GPU's stream processors. Because of the unified architecture, the stream processors can be used to do physics calculations.

So, it is a software solution based on their current hardware. Unlike what we thought earlier (that NVIDIA would tack on PhysX circuitry), it's really using the standard stream processor.

Incidentally, in games that support PhysX acceleration by the GPU, some of the stream processors will be used for physics calculations. That means lower shader and vertex performance. This should not be a problem for the higher-end cards but it will kill cards like the GeForce 8600 GTS.

[Dashken]

When NVIDIA bought AGEIA in February 2008, everyone wondered what the outcome would be. Would the new NVIDIA GTX 280 and GTX 260 come with an integrated AGEIA PhysX processor? Or will NVIDIA just use a software solution? Well, the simple answer to that NVIDIA went the software route. After all, the unified architecture used by NVIDIA since the G80 should have no problem handling physics calculations as well.

NVIDIA has finally made public the "final" ForceWare 177.39 driver. Some of those who used the "earlier" 177.39 driver had trouble installing the driver. That problem has been fixed although the driver still retained the same revision number. You can get the "final" ForceWare 177.39 drivers at these locations...

Here's a quote from the editorial :-

"You will need to install the latest 177.39 ForceWare driver in addition to the PhysX driver. At this moment, PhysX support has only been enabled for those four GPUs. NVIDIA will progressively enable PhysX support in the other GeForce 9 and GeForce 8 graphics over the next few weeks."

Link : ED#95 : NVIDIA Launches PhysX Rev. 2.0