ASUS AGEIA PHYSX PPU card Review 11
Gripen 22 Jun 2006

Pricing of ASUS AGEIA PHYSX P1

GRAW benchmarks

Looks like patch 1.1 together with the newer Aegia driver(2.4.3) fix most of the performance decrease encountered in GRAW by earlier web reviews.

Although the PhysX effects were nice, extra debris from a explosion disappears very quickly(within 10 seconds). That's not very realistic, although it's probably done to reduce impact on performance.


Conclusion

The performance hit from enabling PPU effects is small in our limited benchmarks, costing little to no impact to overall fps per second.  The Aegia card package from Asus is pretty decent with a full retail game & 2 game demos.

If you are playing none of the games supported, it's best to wait for more software support to surface before dropping your cash on a PhysX card. As of the writing of this review, there is only a handful of retail games like City of Villians, GRAW and Bet on Soldier that supports PhysX. CellFactor, as impressive & innovative as it is, is a single-level demo, not a full game.

Overall, the PhysX PPU does delivers the candy eye visual effects it promises, but limited software support makes it difficult to justify spending S$400+ on it right now. Furthermore, a new graphics card or cpu upgrade could be done with the same amount of money. Which is more cost effective for your gaming needs?

With ATI & Nvidia getting into the physics market, it looks like competition will heat up in the near future. Hopefully that will encourage more developers to add Physics support in their games.

Pros

• Delivers more detailed and interactive gaming environments.

• Prospect of delivering more in the future as games make more full use of PhysX SDK

Cons

• Limited software support

• Expensive
  

• External power connector needed

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.

[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11]

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