Legit Reviews

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 8:55 am**

ASUS's AGEIA PhysX P1 Card (PPU)

Today Legit Reviews has the ASUS PhysX P1 card on the test bench, which adopted Ageia's all-new PhysX Processing Unit (PPU) that hopes to take gamers to a completely new level of video realism. Read on and see what the card does, how much power it consumes, what games will be supported, and our general thoughts on a PPU.

Many of the features found on the AGEIA PhysX core architecture are still a mystery to many of us. The PhysX is said to have "dozens" of fully independent cores, which makes sense if the card has 20 giga-instructions per second (20 GIPS) like AGEIA told us. To sum the architecture up we know that PhysX cards consist of a PhysX PPU with a 125 million transistor chip built on TSMC’s 130nm process that is connected over a high bandwidth bus to 128MB GDDR3 memory.

Article Title: ASUS's AGEIA PhysX P1 Card

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 9:41 am**

I got to play around with the card a bit throughout the last couple of days and I must say there is a definite difference in explosions and such. It's most impressive when you can see the gameplay both with and without the PhysX card like in the screen shots of GRAW.

However, is it worth the price of yet another piece of hardware in your system to get the latest and greatest effects of see more particles bouncing around? That's up to you.

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 10:51 am**

i'm suprised by the lack of comments so far... what are your thoughts?

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 2:36 pm**

I've yet to read this.................hopefully I can find the time this evening.

(working lates)

'bout time we have a review on this

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 3:15 pm**

i honestly dont think its worth it yet. for an over 200 price tag for some "ooooo's and ahhhhhhh's" i wont get one. Now if it gave me an extra 40fps or so, then yeah, i might be interested.

Overall i think its a great card but not worth its price for what it offers.

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 3:33 pm**

you got the nail on the head with that. I would be willing to spend $100 maybe $150 on something that would reduce the load on my gfx processor so i got more fps or higher IQ. The problem with it right now is that it actualy lowers your IQ and FPS because of the increased render load owing to the added particles and objects.

I will get one some day but not yet, thats for sure.

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 3:40 pm**

Ditto the two post above me. It's pretty sweet though!

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 3:52 pm**

Yeah it's too expensive! I'll wait 6mths for mature drivers and v-good game support.......hopefully by then all the early adopters will have brought the price down...

I think it's a bit of an anti-climax.....I was hoping for so much more from AGEIA.......

I do hope AGEIA don't get put-off by this as they potentially have a great product!

Posted: **Thu May 18, 2006 4:17 pm**

too expensive, I could see if it helped up your framerates significantly but as it is until the new rig gets built I can't handle most of the newer games anyway. And even if I could (which I will with the new rig), this won't be part of it. 200$ with be put into something else