BFG AGEIA PhysX preview

We all know the story by now… Ageia develops the worlds first add in physics card, names it PhysX and sends it out to the public… but all we have seen so far is the demos from the GDC where Cell Factor was being played on beefed up systems with the Ageia PhysX card. I have been fortunate enough to have the chance to play around with the new PhysX PPU provided to us by Ageia and BFG.

The BFG version of the PhysX card comes equipped with 128MB of onboard GDDR3 memory with an effective data rate of 733 MHz and operates through a standard 32-bit PCI 3.0 bus. The PPU itself has 125 million transistors and is built using .13 micron technology. The memory bandwidth is rated at 12Gbytes/sec. with a peak instruction bandwidth of 20 billion instructions per second.

Those are all nice numbers but I am more interested in what they translate into when playing games. This isn’t a full fledged review, but rather a look at what more than likely will be possible when games are released. This is designed to let you all know what I am going through when I test out the PhysX PPU from Ageia.

Techgage