Aegia PhysX Card

The PhysX card, some of you may or may not have heard about this ground breaking new technology that was released earlier this year. The general idea behind this new technology is that it is a PPU, a physics processing unit. It’s designed specifically to handle how physics work in games and relieve stress from your GPU and CPU by taking most of the required work and ‘redirecting’ it to the card. It’s considered a dedicated piece of hardware and has been a very controversial subject for the past few years. Is the PhysX card a good purchase? Not at this point in time!

A company by the name of Ageia has recently came out with a physics accelerator card. It will fit into any computers PCI slot. But is it a must have? Although this has been on the market since the beginning of ’06 it hasn’t really taken off. This could be because of the lack of support for it. You won’t find this PCI add-in card at your local computer store but there are several places on-line where you get one of these. At this point in time there are only a handful of games that actually support and use this card to its full potential.

All games use a combination of three different types of ‘engines’. An engine is basically a building block for games. The first engine, and the most important, is the game engine. The game engine is responsible for running everything from how the game is supposed to react when you press a certain button to what it’s supposed to do when you exit the game. The other two types are similar in how and when their computations are handled. They are game-play physics and effects physics.

Game-play physics is what directly effects how the game is played. It covers things such as gravity and inertia. Think of it like gravity, if you want objects to stay on the floor then you need to have a force pushing down on all the objects. Most developers keep this kind of game-play physics to a minimum. Too much of it and it could lead to a pretty resource demanding game. The amount of physics required to run a game can be gauged by looking at the minimum system requirements. The higher the requirements the more game-play physics are used.

Effect physics are different because although they may change the experience of the game, they will ultimately not effect the outcome of the game. These types of options are often configurable through options menus and are occasionally only shown if the computer is capable of enabling them. Examples of such effects are how much detail you want when something explodes. An exploding object will always break up into a few pieces, but it’s not very realistic. Through the options menu you may be able to set objects to break up into more pieces if your hardware can handle it.

Before this technology came out all this was handled between the CPU and the GPU on your graphics card. Now it’s possible to extend to potential of GPU’s by taking some of the physics work away from it and relying on the PhysX card to do the dirty work.

Sometimes, game-play physics and effects-physics will ‘spill-over’ into one another if necessary. Over time, if new elements of physics are added to games and there comes a great deal of demand for it, then it will become mandatory. There has not been any talk of developers planning on using this new technology .According to ATI and NVIDIA, developers are currently not working on titles that require a PPU card to accelerate the game-play physics. This makes sense, as few people are willing to go purchase an additional card just to make a particular game run. So it’s a safe bet to assume that you will not use the PhysX card for some time to come even if you decide to purchase it.