Conclusion
When a new technology comes along we are often quite enthusiastic. This time, however, we have to be honest, we were rather disappointed. When the PhysX processor was introduced by Ageia several months ago, we saw it as an overall physics accelerator, but this isn’t the case. Starting a game using the PhysX engine isn’t enough to benefit from the PhysX processor (would Ageia play on this confusion?). To exploit the PhysX processor, developers have to specifically address each effect they want to accelerate.
The support of a PhysX processor was added to Bet on Soldier and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter in the last phase of their development. They chose to implement a particle effect to increase the realism of explosions. If this is the case, gameplay is increased even if it was Ageia’s first selling point for their solution compared to the GPU physics graphic acceleration that only concerns visual effects. Ageia still has to demonstrate the superiority of their solution compared to a CPU/GPU combination. How is this possible? Do developers want and can they develop different gameplay for some users? On top of its additional cost and because the whole chain of development has to take it into account from the start, would it be acceptable to favour some players in terms of gameplay? The problem exists of course for multiplayer games.
And this isn’t all, because Ageia still has to demonstrate the card and system performances once the PhysX card is in use. If our synthetic tests showed that it really does have some potential, there is no guarantee at this time that it could be transmitted concretely to games. For now, a simple use for surface effects literally kills performances. What would happen with a more in depth use?
The only beginning of answer that we can give is that Ageia probably is aware of this fact and that the PhysX really can add something but that it has to be taken in account at the beginning of the development of games. In the end we can only advise you not to rush out and buy the PhysX card. The ball is in Ageia’s court and they still have to convince us.
There is one last question. Is it really beneficial for the user to have a generalisation of physics accelerators? Wouldn’t it be better to only focus on the CPU and GPU that already represent a considerable budget even if it would mean the delay of physics explosion in games? The evolution of multi core CPUs brings more and more calculation power and we can logically think that it would be more interesting to attribute one or more cores to physics processing. For Ageia and its partners, it’s the occasion to create a new market but here again our current opinion doesn’t go in that direction. However, only one game with sufficient improvements would be enough to make us change our mind. UT 2007 ? Cell Factor ? the
first videos of the latter are interesting now the only thing left is to see them in practice…
